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ESSAYS AND LITERARY STUDIES 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

MOONBEAMS FROM THE LARGER 
LUNACY $1.25 net 

NONSENSE NOVELS $1.00 net 

LITERARY LAPSES $1.25 net 

BEfflND THE BEYOND $1.00 net 

SUNSHINE SKETCHES $1.25 net 

ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH 
THE IDLE RICH $1.25 net 



ESSAYS 

AND 

LITERARY STUDIES 



BY STEPHEN LEACOCK 

AUTHOR OF "moonbeams FROM THE LARGER^'lUNACY," 

"nonsense novels," "literary lapses," etc. 



NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
TORONTO: /. .*. .'. S.B. GUNDY 
.-. .*. .-. .*. MCMXVI .-. .*. .-. .-. 






^'^ 



Copyright, 1916, 
By John Lane Company 




Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York, U. S. A. 

APR 17 1916 
^CI.A427736 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Apology of a Professor ... 9 

- II. The Devil and the Deep Sea . . 39 

III. Literature and Education in America 63 

IV. American Humour 97 

V. The Woman Question 137 

VI. The Lot of the Schoolmaster . . 161 

VII. Fiction and Reality 191 

Vni. The Amazing Genius of O. Henry . 231 

IX. A Rehabilitation of Charles II . 267 



THE APOLOGY OF A 
PROFESSOR 



/. — The Apology of a Professor 

An Essay on Modern Learning 

I KNOW no more Interesting subject of 
speculation, nor any more calculated to 
allow of a fair-minded difference of 
opinion, than the enquiry whether a 
professor has any right to exist. Prima facie, 
of course, the case is heavily against him. His 
angular overcoat, his missing buttons, and his 
faded hat, will not bear comparison with the 
double-breasted splendour of the stock broker, 
or the Directoire fur gown of the cigar maker. 
Nor does a native agility of body compensate 
for the missing allurement of dress. He cannot 
skate. He does not shoot. He must not swear. 
He is not brave. His mind, too, to the outsider 
at any rate, appears defective and seriously 
damaged by education. He cannot appreciate 
a twenty-five-cer]it novel, or a melodrama, or 
a moving-picture show, or any of that broad 

9 



Essays and Literary Studies 

current of Intellectual movement which soothes 
the brain of the business man in its moments 
of inactivity. His conversation, even to the 
tolerant, is impossible. Apparently he has 
neither ideas nor enthusiasms, nothing but an 
elaborate catalogue of dead men's opinions 
which he cites with a petulant and peevish au- 
thority that will not brook contradiction, and 
that must be soothed by a tolerating acqui- 
escence, or flattered by a plenary acknowledg- 
ment of ignorance. 

Yet the very heaviness of this initial indict- 
ment against the professor might well sug- 
gest to an impartial critic that there must at 
least be mitigating circumstances in the case. 
Even if we are to admit that the indictment 
is well founded, the reason is all the greater 
for examining the basis on which it rests. At 
any rate some explanation of the facts involved 
may perhaps serve to palliate, if not to remove; 
demerits which are rather to be deplored than 
censured. It is one of the standing defects of 
our age that social classes, or let us say more 
narrowly, social categories, know so little of 

lO 



The Apology of a Professor 

one another. For the purposes of ready 
reckoning, of that handy transaction of busi- 
ness which is the passion of the hour, we have 
adopted a way of labelling one another with 
the tag mark of a profession or an occupation 
that becomes an aid to business but a barrier 
to Intercourse. This man is a professor, that 
man an "insurance man,'' a third — terque 
quaterque heatus — a "liquor man"; with these 
are "railroad men," "newspaper men," "dry 
goods men," and so forth. The things that 
we handle for our livelihood impose themselves 
upon our personality, till the very word "man" 
drops out, and a gentleman is referred to as 
a "heavy pulp and paper interest" while an- 
other man is a prominent "rubber plant"; two 
or three men round a dinner table become an 
"iron and steel circle," and thus It is that for 
the simple conception of a human being is 
substituted a complex of "interests," "rings," 
"circles," "sets," and other semi-geometrical 
figures arising out of avocations rather than 
affinities. Hence it comes that insurance men 
mingle with insurance men, liquor men mix, if 

II 



Essays and Literary Studies 

one may use the term without afterthought, 
with liquor men: what looks like a lunch be- 
tween three men at a club is really a cigar hav- 
ing lunch with a couple of plugs of tobacco. 

Now the professor more than any ordinary 
person finds himself shut out from the general 
society of the business world. The rest of the 
"interests'' have, after all, some things in com- 
mon. The circles intersect at various points. 
Iron and steel has a certain fellowship with 
pulp and paper, and the whole lot of them 
may be converted into the common ground of 
preference shares and common stock. But the 
professor is to all of them an outsider. Hence 
his natural dissimilarity is unduly heightened 
in its appearance by the sort of avocational iso- 
lation in which he lives. 

Let us look further into the status and the 
setting of the man. To begin with, history has 
been hard upon him. For some reason the 
strenuous men of activity and success in the 
drama of life have felt an instinctive scorn of 
the academic class, which they have been at 
no pains to conceal. Bismarck knew of no 

12 



The Aioology of a Professor 

more bitter taunt to throw at the Free Trade 
economists of England than to say that they 
were all either clergymen or professors. Na- 
poleon felt a life-long abhorrence of the class, 
broken only by one brief experiment that ended 
in failure. It is related that at the apogee of 
the Imperial rule, the idea flashed upon him 
that France must have learned men, that the 
professors must be encouraged. He decided to 
act at once. Sixty-live professors were invited 
that evening to the palace of the Tuileries. 
They came. They stood about in groups, mel- 
ancholy and myopic beneath the light. Napo- 
leon spoke to them in turn. To the first he 
spoke of fortifications. The professor in re- 
ply referred to the binomial theorem. ^'Put 
him out," said Napoleon. To the second he 
spoke of commerce. The professor in answer 
cited the opinions of Diodorus Siculus. 'Tut 
him out," said Napoleon. At the end of half 
an hour Napoleon had had enough of the pro- 
fessors. "Cursed idealogues," he cried; "put 
them all out." Nor were they ever again ad- 
mitted. 

13 



Essays and Literary Studies 

Nor Is it only in this way that the course of 
history has been unkind to the professor. It 
Is a notable fact In the past, that all persons 
of eminence who might have shed a lustre up- 
on the academic class are absolved from the 
title of professor, and the world at large is 
Ignorant that they ever wore It. We never 
hear of the author of The Wealth of Na- 
tions as Professor Smith, nor do we know 
the poet of Evangeline as Professor Long- 
fellow. The military world would smile to 
see the heroes of the Southern Confederacy 
styled Professor Lee and Professor Jackson. 
We do not know of Professor Harrison as the 
occupant of a President's chair. Those whose 
talk is of dreadnoughts and of strategy never 
speak of Professor Mahan, and France has 
long since forgotten the proper title of Pro- 
fessor Guizot and Professor Taine. Thus it 
is that the ingratitude of an undlscerning public 
robs the professorial class of the honour of its 
noblest names. Nor does the evil stop there. 
For, In these latter days at least, the same pub- 
lic which eliminates the upward range of the 

14 



The Apology of a Professor 

term, applies it downwards and sideways with 
indiscriminating generality. It is a "profes- 
sor" who plays upon the banjo. A "professor" 
teaches swimming. Hair cutting, as an art, is 
imparted in New York by "professors"; while 
any gentleman whose thaumaturgic intercom- 
munication with the world of spirits has 
reached the point of interest which warrants 
space advertising in the daily press, explains 
himself as a "professor" to his prospective cli- 
ents. So it comes that the true professor finds 
all his poor little attributes of distinction, — 
his mock dignity, his gown, his string of sup- 
plementary letters — all taken over by a mer- 
cenary age to be exploited, as the stock in 
trade of an up-to-date advertiser. The vendor 
of patent medicine depicts himself in the ad- 
vertising columns in a gown, with an uplifted 
hand to shew the Grecian draping of the fold. 
After his name are placed enough letters and 
full stops to make up a simultaneous equation 
in algebra. 

The word "professor" has thus become a 
generic term, indicating the assumption of any 

IS 



Essays and Literary Studies 

form of dexterity, from hair-cutting to running 
the steam shovel in a crematorium. It is even 
customary — I am informed — to designate in 
certain haunts of meretricious gaiety the gen- 
tleman whose efforts at the piano are rewarded 
by a per capita contribution of ten cents from 
every guest, — the "professor.*' 

One may begin to see, perhaps, the peculiar 
disadvantage under which the professor la- 
bours in finding his avocation confused with the 
various branches of activity for which he can 
feel nothing but a despairing admiration. But 
there are various ways also in v/hich the very 
circumstances of his profession cramp and bind 
him. In the first place there is no doubt that 
his mind is very seriously damaged by his per- 
petual contact with the students. I would not 
for a moment imply that a university would be 
better off without the students; although the 
point is one which might well elicit earnest dis- 
cussion. But their effect upon the professor is 
undoubtedly bad. He is surrounded by an at- 
mosphere of sycophantic respect. His students, 
on his morning^ arrival, remove his overshoes 

i6 



The Apology of a Professor 

and hang up his overcoat. They sit all day 
writing down his lightest words with stylo- 
graphic pens of the very latest model. They 
laugh at the meanest of his jests. They treat 
him with a finely simulated respect that has 
come down as a faint tradition of the old days 
of Padua and Bologna, when a professor was 
In reality the venerated master, a man who 
wanted to teach, and the students disciples who 
wanted to learn. 

All that is changed now. The supreme Im- 
port of the professor to the students now lies 
In the fact that he controls the examinations. 
He holds the golden key which will unlock the 
door of the temple of learning, — unlock it, that 
Is, not to let the student in, but to let him get 
out, — Into something decent. This fact gives 
to the professor a fictitious importance, easily 
confounded with his personality, similar to that 
of the gate keeper at a dog show, or the ticket 
wicket man at a hockey match. 

In this Is seen some part of the consequences 
of the vast, organised thing called modern edu- 
cation. Everything has the merits of its defects. 

17 



Essays and Literary Studies 

It is a grand thing and a possible thing, that 
practically all people should possess the intel- 
lectual-mechanical arts of reading, writing, and 
computation : good too that they should possess 
pigeon-holed and classified data of the geogra- 
phy and history of the world; admirable too 
that they should possess such knowledge of the 
principles of natural science as will enable them 
to put a washer on a kitchen tap, or inflate a' 
motor tire with a soda-syphon bottle. All this 
is splendid. This we have got. And this 
places us collectively miles above the rude il- 
literate men of arms, burghers, and villeins of 
the middle ages who thought the moon took its 
light from God, whereas we know that its light 
is simply a function of ir divided by the square 
of its distance. 

Let me not get confused in my thesis. I am 
saying that the universal distribution of me- 
chanical education is a fine thing, and that we 
have also proved it possible. But above this* 
IS the utterly different thing, — we have no good 
word for it, call it learning, wisdom, enlighten- 
ment, anything you will — which means not a 

i8 



The Apology of a Professor 

mechanical acquirement from without but some- 
thing done from within: a power and willing- 
ness to think: an interest, for its own sake, in 
that general enquiry into the form and mean- 
ing of life which constitutes the ground plan 
of education. Now this, desirable though it is, 
cannot be produced by the mechanical compul- 
sion of organised education. It belongs, and 
always has, to the few and never to the many. 
The ability to think is rare. Any man can 
think and think hard when he has to : the sav- 
age devotes a nicety of thought to the equi- 
poise of his club, or the business man to the 
adjustment of a market price. But the ability 
or desire to think without compulsion about 
things that neither warm the hands nor fill the 
stomach, is very rare. Reflexion on the rid- 
dle of life, the cruelty of death, the innate sav- 
agery and the sublimity of the creature man, 
the history and progress of man in his little 
earth-dish of trees and flowers, — all these 
things taken either "straight^' in the masculine 
form of philosophy and the social sciences, or 
taken by diffusion through the feminised form 

19 



Essays and Literary Studies 

literature, constitute the operation of the edu- 
cated mind. Of all these things most people 
in their degree think a little and then stop. 
They realise presently that these things are very 
difficult, and that they don't matter, and that 
there is no money in them. Old men never 
think of them at all. They are glad enough to 
stay in the warm daylight a little longer. For 
a working solution of these problems different 
things are done. Some people use a clergy- 
man. Others declare that the Hindoos know 
all about it. Others, especially of late, pay 
a reasonable sum for the services of a profes- 
sional thaumaturgist who supplies a solution of 
the soul problem by mental treatment at long 
range, radiating from State St., Chicago. 
Others, finally, of a native vanity that will not 
admit itself vanquished, buckle about them- 
selves a few little formulas of '^evolution'* and 
"force," co-relate the conception of God to 
the differentiation of a frog's foot, and strut 
through life emplumed with the rump-feathers 
of their own conceit. 

I trust my readers will not think that I have 

20 



The Apology of a Professor 

forgotten my professor. I have not. All of 
this digression is but an instance of reculer 
pour mieux sauter. It is necessary to bring out 
all this back-ground of the subject to show the 
setting in which the professor is placed. Pos- 
sibly we shall begin to see that behind this 
quaint being in his angular overcoat are cer- 
tain greater facts in respect to the general re- 
lation of education to the world of which the 
professor is only a product, and which help 
to explain, if they do not remove, the dislo- 
cated misfit of his status among his fellow men. 
We were saying then that the truly higher edu- 
cation — thought about life, mankind, literature, 
art, — cannot be handed out at will. To at- 
tempt to measure it off by the yard, to mark 
it out into stages and courses, to sell It at 
the commutation rate represented by a college 
sessional fee — all this produces a contradiction 
in terms. For the thing itself is substituted 
an imitation of it. For real wisdom, — obtain- 
able only by the few, — is substituted a nickel- 
plated make-believe obtainable by any person 
of ordinary intellect who has the money, and 

21 



Essays and Literary Studies 

who has also, In the good old Latin sense, the 
needful assiduity. I am not saying that the 
system is bad. It is the best we can get; and 
incidentally, and at back-rounds it turns out a 
bye-product in the shape of a capable and well- 
trained man who has forgotten all about the 
immortality of the soul, in which he never had 
any interest any way, but who conducts a law 
business with admirable efficiency. 

The result, then, of this odd-looking sys- 
tem is, that what ought to be a thing existing 
for itself is turned into a qualification for some- 
thing else. The reality of a student's studies 
is knocked out by the grim earnestness of hav- 
ing to pass an examination. How can a man 
really think of literature, or of the problem 
of the soul, who knows that he must learn the 
contents of a set of books in order to pass an 
examination which will give him the means of 
his own support and, perhaps, one half the 
support of his mother, or fifteen per cent, of 
that of a maiden aunt. The pressure of cir- 
cumstances is too much. The meaning of study 
is lost. The qualification is everything. 

22 



The Apology of a Professor 

Not that the student finds his burden heavy 
or the situation galling. He takes the situa- 
tion as he finds it, is hugely benefited by it at 
back-rounds, and, being young, adapts himself 
to it: accepts with indifference whatever pro- 
gramme may be needful for the qualification 
that he wants : studies Hebrew or Choctaw with 
equal readiness; and, as his education pro- 
gresses, will write you a morning essay on tran- 
scendental utilitarianism, and be back again to 
lunch. At the end of his course he has learned 
much. He has learned to sit, — that first 
requisite for high professional work, — and he 
can sit for hours. He can write for hours with 
a stylographic pen : more than that, for I wish 
to state the case fairly, he can make a digest, 
or a summary, or a reproduction of anything 
in the world. Incidentally the speculation is 
all knocked sideways out of him. But the lack 
of it is never felt. 

Observe that it was not so in Padua. The 
student came thither from afar off, on foot or 
on a mule; so I picture him at least in my 
ignorance of Italian history, seated droopingly 

23 



Essays and Literary Studies 

upon a mule, with earnest, brown eyes hungered 
with the desire to know, and in his hand a 
vellum-bound copy of Thomas Aquinas written 
in long hand, priceless, as he thinks, for the 
wisdom it contains. Now the Padua student 
wanted to know: not for a qualification, not 
because he wanted to be a pharmaceutical ex- 
pert with a municipal licence, but because he 
thought the things in Thomas Aquinas and 
such to be things of tremendous import. They 
were not; but he thought so. This student 
thought that he could really find out things: 
that if he listened daily to the words of the 
master who taught him, and read hard, and 
thought hard, he would presently discover real 
truths, — the only things in life that he cared 
for, — such as whether the soul is a fluid or a 
solid, whether his mule existed or was only 
a vapour, and much other of this sort. These 
things he fully expected to learn. For their 
sake he brought to bear on the person of his 
teacher that reverential admiration which sur- 
vives faintly to-day, like a biological 'Ve^s- 
tige," in the attitude of the college student who 

24 



The Apology of a Professor 

holds the overcoat of his professor. The Pad- 
ua student, too, got what he came for. After 
a time he knew all about the soul, all about 
his mule, — knew, too, something of the more 
occult, the almost devilish sciences, perilous to 
tackle, such as why the sun is suspended from 
falling into the ocean, or the very demonology 
of symbolism, — the AL-GEB of the Arabians 
— by which X + Y taken to the double or 
square can be shown after many days' compu- 
tation to be equal to X^ + 2XY + Y^. 

A man with such knowledge simply had to 
teach it. What to him if he should wear a 
brown gown of frieze and feed on pulse ! This, 
as beside the bursting force of the expanding 
steam of his knowledge, counted for nothing. 
So he went forth, and he in turn became a pro- 
fessor, a man of profound acquirement, whose 
control over malign comets elicited a shudder- 
ing admiration. 

These last reflections seem to suggest that 
it is not merely that something has gone wrong 
with the attitude of the student and the pro- 
fessor towards knowledge, but that something 

25 



Essays and Literary Studies 

has gone wrong with knowledge itself. We 
have got the thing into such a shape that we 
do not know one-tenth as much as we used to. 
Our modern scholarship has poked and pried In 
so many directions, has set itself to be so ultra- 
rational, so hyper-sceptical, that now it knows 
nothing at all. All the old certainty has van- 
ished. The good old solid dogmatic dead-sure- 
ness that buckled itself in the oak and brass 
of its own stupidity is clean gone. It died at 
about the era of the country squire, the fox- 
hunting parson, the three-bottle Prime Min- 
ister, and the voluminous Doctor of Divinity 
in broadcloth imperturbable even in sobriety, 
and positively omniscient when drunk. We 
have argued them off the stage of a world all 
too ungrateful. In place of their sturdy out- 
lines appear that sickly anaemic Modern Schol- 
arship, the double-jointed jack-in-the-box, Mod- 
ern Religion, the feminine angularity of Mod- 
ern Morality, bearing a jug of filtered water, 
and behind them, as the very lord of wisdom, 
the grinning mechanic. Practical Science, using 
the broadcloth suit of the defunct doctor as 

26 



The Apology of a Professor 

his engine-room over-alls. Or if we prefer to 
place the same facts without the aid of per- 
sonification, our learning has so watered itself 
down that the starch and consistency Is all out 
of it. There is no absolute sureness anywhere. 
Everything is henceforth to be a development, 
an evolution ; morals and ethics are turned from 
fixed facts to shifting standards that change 
from age to age like the fashion of our clothes; 
art and literature are only a product, not good 
or bad, but a part of its age and environment. 
So it comes that our formal studies are no lon- 
ger a burning quest for absolute truth. We 
have long since discovered that we cannot know 
anything. Our studies consist only in the long- 
drawn proof of the futility for the search after 
knowledge effected by exposing the errors of 
the past. Philosophy Is the science which 
proves that we can know nothing of the soul. 
Medicine is the science which tells that we know 
nothing of the body. Political Economy Is that 
which teaches that we know nothing of the laws 
of wealth; and Theology the critical history 

27 



Essays and Literary Studies 

of those errors from which we deduce our Ig- 
norance of God. 

When I sit and warm my hands, as best I 
may, at the little heap of embers that Is now 
Political Economy, I cannot but contrast its 
dying glow with the generous blaze of the vain- 
glorious and triumphant science that once It 
was. 

Such Is the distinctive character of modern 
learning, imprint with a resigned agnosticism 
towards the search after truth, able to refute 
everything and to believe nothing, and leav- 
ing its once earnest devotees stranded upon 
the arid sands of their own Ignorance. In the 
face of this fact can It be wondered that a 
university converts itself into a sort of mill, 
grinding out its graduates, legally qualified, 
with conscientious regularity? The students 
take the mill as they find it, perform their task 
and receive their reward. They listen to their 
professor. They write down with stylographic 
pens in loose-leaf note books his most inane 
and his most profound speculations with an un- 
discriminating impartiality. The reality of the 

28 



The Apology of a Professor 

subject leaves but little trace upon their minds. 

All of what has been said above has been 
directed mainly towards the hardship of the 
professor^s lot upon Its scholastic side. Let 
me turn to another aspect of his life, the moral. 
By a strange confusion of thought a professor 
Is presumed to be a good man. His standing 
association with the young and the history of 
his profession, which was once amalgamated 
with that of the priesthood, give him a con- 
nexion at one remove with morality. He there- 
fore finds himself in that category of men, — 
including himself and the curate as its chief 
representatives, — to whom the world at large 
Insists on ascribing a rectitude of character and 
a simplicity of speech that unfits them for ordi- 
nary society. It is gratuitously presumed that 
such men prefer tea to whiskey-and-soda, blind- 
man's buff to draw poker, and a freshmen's 
picnic to a prize fight. 

For the curate of course I hold no brief. 
Let him sink. In any case he has to console 
him the favour of the sex, a concomitant per- 
haps of his very harmlessness, but productive 

29 



Essays and Literary Studies 

at the same time of creature comforts. Soft 
slippers deck his little feet, flowers lie upon his 
study table, and round his lungs the warmth of 
an embroidered chest-protector proclaims the 
favour of the fair. Of this the ill-starred pro- 
fessor shares nothing. It is a sad fact that* 
he is at once harmless and despised. He may 
lecture for twenty years and never find so much 
as a mullein stalk upon his desk. For him no 
canvas slippers, knitted by fair fingers, nor the 
flowered gown, nor clock-worked hosiery of the 
ecclesiastic. The sex will have none of him. I 
do not mean, of course, that there are no 
women that form exceptions to this rule. We 
have all seen immolated upon the academic 
hearth, and married to professors, women 
whose beauty and accomplishments would have 
adorned the home of a wholesale liquor mer- 
chant. But the broad rule still obtains. 
Women who embody, so St. Augustine has told 
us, the very principle of evil, can only really 
feel attracted towards bad men. The profes- 
sor is too good for them. 

Whether a professor is of necessity a good 

30 



The Apology of a Professor 

man, is a subject upon which I must not pre- 
sume to dogmatise. The women may be right 
in voting him a "muff." But if he is such in 
any degree, the conventional restrictions of his 
profession tend to heighten it. The bursts of 
profanity that are hailed as a mark of busi- 
ness energy on the part of a railroad magnate 
or a cabinet minister are interdicted to a pro- 
fessor. It is a canon of his profession that 
he must never become violent, nor lift his hand 
In anger. I believe that it was not always so. 
The story runs, authentic enough, that three 
generations ago a Harvard professor in a fit 
of anger with a colleague (engendered, if I 
recall the case, by the discussion of a nice point 
in thermo-dynamics) threw him into a chemical 
furnace and burned him. But the buoyancy of 
those days is past. In spite of the existence 
of our up-to-date apparatus, I do not believe 
that any of our present professoriate has yield- 
ed to such an impulse. 

One other point remains worthy of remark 
in the summation of the heavy disadvantages 
under which the professor lives and labours. 

31 



Essays and Literary Studies 

He does not know how to make money. This 
is a grave fault, and one that in the circum- 
stances of the day can scarcely be overlooked. 
It comes down to him as a legacy of the Padua 
days when the professor neither needed money 
nor thought of it. Now when he would like 
money he is hampered by an "evoluted" inabil- 
ity to get hold of it. He dares not commercial- 
ise his profession, or does not know how to 
do so. Had he the business instinct of the lead- 
ers of labour and the master manufacturers, he 
would long since have set to work at the prob- 
lem. He would have urged his government to 
put so heavy a tax on the import of foreign 
professors as to keep the home market for 
himself. He would have organised himself 
into amalgamated Brotherhoods of Instructors 
of Latin, United Greek Workers of America, 
and so forth, organised strikes, picketed the. 
houses of the college trustees, and made him- 
self a respected place as a member of indus- 
trial society. This his inherited inaptitude for- 
bids him to do. 

Nor can the professor make money out of 

32 



The Apology of a Professor 

what he knows. Somehow a plague Is on the 
man. A teacher of English cannot write a half- 
dime novel, nor a professor of dynamics Invent 
a safety razor. The truth Is that a modern 
professor for commercial purposes doesn't 
know anything. He only knows parts of 
things. 

It occurred to me some years ago when the 
Cobalt silver mines were first discovered that 
a professor of scientific attainments ought to 
be able, by transferring his talent to that re- 
gion, to amass an enormous fortune. I ques- 
tioned one of the most gifted of my colleagues. 
''Could you not," I asked, "as a specialist in 
metals discover silver mines at sight?" "Oh, 
no," he said, shuddering at the very idea, "you 
see I'm only a metallurgist; at Cobalt the silver 
is all in the rocks and I know nothing of rocks 
whatever." "Who then," I said, "knows about 
rocks?" "For that," he answered, "you need 
a geologist like Adamson; but then, you see, 
he knows the rocks, but doesn't know the sil- 
ver." "But could you not both go," I said, 
"and Adamson hold the rock while you extract- 

33 



Essays and Literary Studies 

ed the silver?" *'0h, no," the professor an- 
sweredj "you see we are neither of us mining 
engineers; and even then we ought to have a 
good hydraulic man and an electric man." "I 
suppose," I said, ''that if I took about seven- 
teen of you up there you might find something. 
No? Well, would it not be possible to get 
somebody who would know something of all 
these things?" "Yes," he said, "any of the 
fourth-year students would, but personally all 
that I do is to reduce the silver when I get it." 
"That I can do myself," I answered musingly, 
and left him. 

Such then is the professor ; a man whose avo- 
cation in life is hampered by the history of its 
past: imparting in the form of statutory exer- 
cises knowledge that in its origin meant a spon- 
taneous effort of the intelligence, whose very 
learning itself has become a profession rather 
than a pursuit, whose mock dignity and ficti- 
tious morality remove him from the society of 
his own sex and deny to him the favour of the 
other. Surely, in this case, to understand is 

34 



The Apology of a Professor 

to sympathise. Is it not possible, too, that 
when all is said and done the professor is per- 
forming a useful service in the world, uncon- 
sciously of course, in acting as a leaven in the 
lump of commercialism that sits so heavily on 
the world to-day? I do not wish to expand 
upon this theme. I had set out to make the 
apology of the professor speak for itself from 
the very circumstances of his work. But in 
these days, when money is everything, when 
pecuniary success is the only goal to be 
achieved, when the voice of the plutocrat is 
as the voice of God, the aspect of the pro- 
fessor, side-tracked in the real race of life, 
riding his mule of Padua in competition with 
an automobile, may at least help to soothe the 
others who have failed in the struggle. 

Dare one, as the wildest of fancies, suggest 
how different things might be if learning count- 
ed, or if we could set it on its feet again, if 
students wanted to learn, and if professors 
had anything to teach, if a university lived for 
itself and not as a place of qualification for 

3S 



Essays and Literary Studies 

the junior employees of the rich; if there were 
only in this perplexing age some way of living 
humbly and retaining the respect of one's fel- 
lows; if a man with a few hundred dollars a 
year could cast out the money question and 
the house question, and the whole business of 
competitive appearances and live for the things 
of the mind! But then, after all, if the mind 
as a speculative instrument has gone bankrupt, 
if learning, instead of meaning a mind full of 
thought, means only a bellyful of fact, one is 
brought to a full stop, standing among the lit- 
tered debris of an ideal that has passed away. 
In any case the question, if it is one, is going 
to settle itself. The professor is passing away. 
The cost of living has laid its hold upon him, 
and grips him in its coils; within another gen- 
eration he will be starved out, frozen out, "evo- 
luted" out by that glorious process of natural 
selection and adaptation, the rigour of which 
is the only God left in our desolated Pantheon. 
The male school-teacher is gone, the male clerk 
is going, and already on the horizon of the aca- 

36 



The Apology of a Professor 

demic market rises the Woman with the Spec- 
tacles, the rude survlvallst who, in the coming 
generation, will dispense the elements of learn- 
ing cut to order, without an afterthought of 
what it once has meant. 



37 



THE DEVIL AND THE 
DEEP SEA 



II.— The Devil and the Deep Sea 

A Discussion of Modern Morality 

THE DEVIL is passing out of fashion. 
After a long and honourable career 
he has fallen into an ungrateful ob- 
livion. His existence has become 
shadowy, his outline attenuated, and his per- 
sonality displeasing to a complacent genera- 
tion. So he stands now leaning on the handle 
of his three-pronged oyster fork and looking 
into the ashes of his smothered fire. Theology 
will have none of him. Genial clergy of ample 
girth, stuffed with the buttered toast of a rec- 
tory tea, are preaching him out of existence. 
The fires of his material hell are replaced by 
the steam heat of moral torture. This even 
the most sensitive of sinners faces with 
equanimity. So the Devil's old dwelling is 
dismantled and stands by the roadside with a 
sign-board bearing the legend, ''Museum of 

41 



Essays and Literary Studies 

Moral Torment, These Premises to Let." In 
front of it, in place of the dancing imp of 
earlier ages, is a poor make-believe thing, a 
jack-o'-lantern on a stick, with a turnip head 
and candle eyes, labelled "Demon of Moral 
Repentance, Guaranteed Worse than Actual 
Fire." The poor thing grins in its very harm- 
lessness. 

Now that the Devil is passing away an un- 
appreciative generation fails to realise the high 
social function that he once performed. There 
he stood for ages a simple and workable basis 
of human morality; an admirable first-hand 
reason for being good, which needed no ulteri- 
or explanation. The rude peasant of the Mid- 
dle Ages, the illiterate artisan of the shop, and 
the long-haired hind of the fields, had no need 
to speculate upon the problem of existence and 
the tangled skein of moral enquiry. The Devil 
took all that off their hands. He had either 
to "be good" or else he "got the fork," just 
as in our time the unsuccessful comedian of 
amateur night in the vaudeville houses "gets 
the hook." Humanity, with the Devil to prod 

42 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

it from behind, moved steadily upwards on the 
path of moral development. Then having at- 
tained a certain elevation, it turned upon its 
tracks, denied that there had been any Devil, 
rubbed itself for a moment by way of inves- 
tigation, said that there had been no prodding, 
and then fell to wandering about on the hill- 
tops without any fixed idea of goal or direc- 
tion. 

In other words, with the disappearance of 
the Devil there still remains unsolved the prob- 
lem of conduct, and behind it the riddle of the 
universe. How are we getting along without 
the Devil? How are we managing to be good 
without the fork? What is happening to our 
conception of goodness itself? 

To begin with, let me disclaim any intention 
of writing of morality from the point of view 
of the technical, or professional, moral phi- 
losopher. Such a person would settle the whole 
question by a few references to pragmatism, 
transcendentalism, and esoteric synthesis, — 
leaving his auditors angry but unable to re- 
taliate. This attitude, I am happy to say, I 

43 



Essays and Literary Studies 

am quite unable to adopt. I do not know what 
pragmatism is, and I do not care. I know 
the word transcendental only in connexion with 
advertisements for "gents' furnishings.^' If 
Kant, or Schopenhauer, or Anheuser Busch 
have already settled these questions, I cannot 
help it. 

In any case, it is my opinion that now-a-days 
we are overridden in the specialties, each in 
his own department of learning, with his tags, 
and label, and his pigeon-hole category of 
proper names, precluding all discussion by ordi- 
nary people. No man may speak fittingly of 
the soul without spending at least six weeks 
in a theological college ; morality is the province 
of the moral philosopher who is prepared to 
pelt the intruder back over the fence with a 
shower of German commentaries. Ignorance, 
in its wooden shoes, shuffles around the portico 
of the temple of learning, stumbling among 
the litter of terminology. The broad field of 
human wisdom has been cut into a multitude of 
little professorial rabbit warrens. In each of 
these a specialist burrows deep, scratching out 

44 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

a shower of terminology, head down in an 
unlovely attitude which places an interlocutor 
at a grotesque conversational disadvantage. 

May I digress a minute to show what I mean 
by the inconvenience of modern learning? This' 
happened at a summer boarding-house where 
I spent a portion of the season of rest, in com- 
pany with a certain number of ordinary, igno- 
rant people like myself. We got on well to- 
gether. In the evenings on the verandah we 
talked of nature and of its beauties, of the stars 
and why they were so far away, — we didn't 
know their names, thank goodness^ — and such- 
like simple topics of conversation. 

Sometimes under the influence of a double- 
shotted sentimentalism sprung from huckle- 
berry pie and doughnuts, we even spoke of 
the larger issues of life, and exchanged opin- 
ions on Immortality. We used no technical* 
terms. We knew none. The talk was harm- 
less and happy. Then there came among us 
a faded man in a coat that had been black be- 
fore it turned green, who was a Ph.D. of Ober- 
lin College. The first night he sat on the veran- 

45 



Essays and Literary Studies 

dah, somebody said how beautiful the sunset 
was. Then the man from Oberlln spoke up 
and said: ''Yes, one could almost fancy it a 
pre-Raphaelite conception with the same chi- 
aroscuro In the atmosphere.'^ There was a 
pause. That ended all nature study for al- 
most an hour. Later in the evening, some one 
who had been reading a novel said in simple 
language that he was sick of having the hero 
always come out on top. "Ah," said the man 
from Oberlln, "but doesn't that precisely cor- 
respond with Nitch's idea (he meant, I sup- 
pose, Nietzsche, but he pronounced it to rhyme 
with 'bitch') of the dominance of man over 
fate?" Mr. Hezekiah Smith who kept the re- 
sort looked round admiringly and said, "Ain't 
he a terrf^ He certainly was. While the man 
from Oberlln stayed with us, elevating conver- 
sation was at an end, and a self-conscious Ig- 
norance hung upon the verandah like a fog. 
However, let us get back to the Devil. Let 
us notice in the first place that because we 
have kicked out the Devil as an absurd and 
ridiculous superstition, unworthy of a scientific 

46 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

age, we have by no means eliminated the su- 
per-natural and the super-rational from the cur- 
rent thought of our time. I suppose there 
never was an age more riddled with supersti- 
tion, more credulous, more drunkenly addicted 
to thaumaturgy than the present. The Devil 
in his palmiest days was nothing to it. In 
despite of our vaunted material common-sense, 
there is a perfect craving abroad for belief in 
something beyond the compass of the believ- 
able. 

It shows itself in every age and class. Sim- 
pering Seventeen gets its fortune told on a 
weighing machine, and shudders with luxuri- 
ous horror at the prospective villainy of the 
Dark Man who is to cross her life. Senile 
Seventy gravely sits on a wooden bench at a 
wonder-working meeting, waiting for a gentle- 
man in a "Tuxedo" jacket to call up the soul of 
Napoleon Bonaparte, and ask its opinion of 
Mr. Taft. Here you have a small tenement, 
let us say, on South Clark St., Chicago. What 
is it? It Is the home of Nadir the Nameless, 
the great Hindoo astrologer. Who are in the 

47 



Essays and Literary Studies 

front room? Clients waiting for a revelation 
of the future. Where is Nadir? He is behind 
a heavily draped curtain, worked with Indian- 
serpents. By the waiting clients Nadir is un- 
derstood to be in consultation with the twin 
fates, Isis and Osiris. In reality Nadir is fry- 
ing potatoes. Presently he will come out from 
behind the curtain and announce that Osiris has 
spoken (that is, the potatoes are now finished 
and on the back of the stove) and that he is 
prepared to reveal hidden treasure at 40 cents 
a revelation. Marvellous, is it not, this Hin- 
doo astrology business? And any one can be 
a Nadir the Nameless, who cares to stain his 
face blue with thimbleberry juice, wrap a red 
turban round his forehead, and cut the rate 
of revelation to 35 cents. Such is the credulity 
of the age which has repudiated the Devil as 
too difficult of belief. 

We have, it is true, moved far away from 
the Devil; but are we after all so much better 
off? or do we. In respect of the future, contain 
within ourselves the promise of better things. 
I suppose that most of us would have the gQn- 

48 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

eral idea that there never was an age which 
displayed so high a standard of morality, or 
at least of ordinary human decency, as our 
own. We look back with a shudder to the 
blood-stained history of our ancestors; the fires 
of Smithfield with the poor martyr writhing 
about his post, frenzied and hysterical in the 
flames; the underground cell where the poor 
remnant of humanity turned its haggard face 
to the torch of the entering gaoler; the mad- 
house itself with its gibbering occupants con- 
verted into a show for the idle fools of Lon- 
don. We may well look back on it all and say 
that, at least, we are better than we were. 
The history of our little human race would 
make but sorry reading were not its every page 
imprinted with the fact that human ingenuity 
has invented no torment too great for human 
fortitude to bear. 

In general decency — sympathy — we have un- 
doubtedly progressed. Our courts of law have 
forgotten the use of the thumbkins and boot; 
we do not press a criminal under "weights 
greater than he can bear" in order to induce 

49 



Essays and Literary Studies 

him to plead; nor flog to ribbands the bleed- 
ing back of the malefactor dragged at the cart's 
tail through the thoroughfares of a crowded 
city. Our public, objectionable though it is, 
as it fights its way to its ball games, breathes 
peanuts and peppermint upon the offended at- 
mosphere, and shrieks aloud its chronic and 
collective hysteria, is at all events better than 
the leering oafs of the Elizabethan century, 
who put hard-boiled eggs in their pockets and 
sat around upon the grass waiting for the 
"burning" to begin. 

But when we have admitted that we are bet- 
ter than we were as far as the facts of our 
moral conduct go, we may well ask as to the 
principles upon which our conduct is based. 
In past ages there was the authoritative moral 
code* as a guide — thou shalt and thou shalt not 
— and behind it the pains, and the penalties, 
and the three-pronged oyster fork. Under that 
influence, humanity, or a large part of it, slow- 
ly and painfully acquired the moral habit. At 
present it goes on, as far as its actions are con- 
cerned, with the momentum of the old beliefs. 

50 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

But when we turn from the actions on the 
surface to the Ideas underneath, we find In 
our time a strange confusion of beliefs out of 
which is presently to be made the New Mo- 
rality. Let us look at some of the varied Ideas 
manifested In the cross sections of the moral 
tendencies of our time. 

Here we have first of all the creed and cult 
of self-development. It arrogates to itself the 
title of New Thought, but contains In reality 
nothing but the Old Selfishness. According to 
this particular outlook the goal of morality is 
found in fully developing one's self. Be large, 
says the votary of this creed, be high, be broad. 
He gives a shilling to a starving man, not that 
the man may be fed but that he himself may 
be a shilling-giver. He cultivates sympathy 
with the destitute for the sake of being sympa- 
thetic. The whole of his virtue and his creed 
of conduct runs to a cheap and easy egomania 
in which his blind passion for himself causes 
him to use external people and things as mere 
reactions upon his own personality. The im- 

51 



Essays and Literary Studies 

moral little toad swells itself to the bursting 
point in its desire to be a moral ox. 

In its more ecstatic form, this creed expresses 
itself in a sort of general feeling of "uplift,'' 
or the desire for internal moral expansion. 
The votary is haunted by the idea of his own 
elevation. He wants to get into touch with 
nature, to swim in the Greater Being, "to tune 
himself," harmonise himself, and generally to 
perform on himself as on a sort of moral ac- 
cordion. He gets himself somehow mixed up 
with natural objects, with the sadness of au- 
tumn, falls with the leaves and drips with the 
dew. Were it not for the complacent self-suf- 
ficiency which he induces, his refined morality 
might easily verge into simple idiocy. Yet, odd 
though it may seem, this creed of self-develop- 
ment struts about with its head high as one of 
the chief moral factors which have replaced 
the authoritative dogma of the older time. 

The vague and hysterical desire to "uplift" 
one's self merely for exaltation's sake is about 
as effective an engine of moral progress as 

52 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

the effort to lift one's self In the air by a ter- 
rific hitching up of the breeches. 

The same creed has Its physical side. It pa- 
rades the Body, with a capital B, as also a 
thing that must be developed ; and this, not for 
any ulterior thing that may be effected by It 
but presumably as an end In Itself. The Monk 
or the Good Man of the older day despised 
the body as a thing that must learn to know 
its betters. He spiked It down with a hair 
shirt to teach it the virtue of submission. He 
was of course very wrong and very objection- 
able. But one doubts if he was much worse 
than his modern successor who joys consciously 
in the operation of his pores and his glands, 
and the correct rhythmical contraction of his 
abdominal muscles, as If he constituted simply 
a sort of superior sewerage system. 

I once knew a man called Juggins who ex- 
emplified this point of view. He used to ride 
a bicycle every day to train his muscles and to 
clear his brain. He looked at all the scenery 
that he passed to develop his taste for scenery. 
He gave to the poor to develop his sympathy 

53 



Essays and Literary Studies 

with poverty. He read the Bible regularly in 
order to cultivate the faculty of reading the 
Bible, and visited picture galleries with painful 
assiduity in order to give himself a feeling for 
art. He passed through life with a strained 
and haunted expression waiting for clarity of 
intellect, greatness of soul, and a passion for 
art to descend upon him like a flock of doves. 
He is now dead. He died presumably in order 
to cultivate the sense of being a corpse. 

No doubt, in the general scheme or purpose 
of things the cult of self-development and the 
botheration about the Body may, through the 
actions which it induces, be working for a good 
end. It plays a part, no doubt, in whatever is 
to be the general evolution of morality. 

And there, in that very word evolution, we 
are brought face to face with another of the 
wide-spread creeds of our day, which seek to 
replace the older. This one is not so much a 
guide to conduct as a theory, and a particularly 
cheap and easy one, of a general meaning and 
movement of morality. The person of this 
persuasion is willing to explain everything in 

54 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

terms of its having been once something else 
and being about to pass into something further 
still. Evolution, as the natural scientists know 
it, is a plain and straightforward matter, not 
so much a theory as a view of a succession of 
facts taken in organic relation. It assumes no 
purposes whatever. It is not — if I may be al- 
lowed a professor's luxury of using a word 
which will not be understood — in any degree 
teleological. 

The social philosopher who adopts the evo- 
lutionary theory of morals is generally one 
who is quite in the dark as to the true concep- 
tion of evolution itself. He understands from 
Darwin, Huxley, and other great writers whom 
he has not read, that the animals have been 
fashioned into their present shape by a long 
process of twisting, contortion, and selection, 
at once laborious and deserving. The giraffe 
lengthened its neck by conscientious stretching; 
the frog webbed its feet by perpetual swim- 
ming; and the bird broke out in feathers by 
unremitting flying. "Nature" by weeding out 
the short giraffe, the inadequate frog, and the 

55 



Essays and Literary Studies 

top-heavy bird encouraged by selection the ones 
most "fit to survive." Hence the origin of 
species, the differentiation of organs^ — hence, 
in fact, everything. 

Here, too, when the theory is taken over and 
mis-translated from pure science to the human- 
ities, is found the explanation of all our social 
and moral growth. Each of our religious cus- 
toms is like the giraffe's neck. A manifesta- 
tion such as the growth of Christianity is re- 
garded as if humanity broke out into a new 
social organism, in the same way as the ascend- 
ing amoeba breaks out into a stomach. With 
this view of human relations, nothing in the 
past is said to be either good or bad. Every- 
thing is a movement. Cannibalism is a sort of 
apprenticeship in meat-eating. The institution 
of slavery is seen as an evolutionary stage 
towards free citizenship, and "Uncle Tom's" 
overseer is no longer a nigger-driver but a so- 
cial force tending towards the survival of the 
Booker Washington type of negro. 

With his brain saturated with the chloroform 
of this social dogma, the moral philosopher 

S6 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

ceases to be able to condemn anything at all, 
measures all things with a centimetre scale of 
his little doctrine, and finds them all of the 
same length. Whereupon he presently desists 
from thought altogether, calls everything bad 
or good an evolution, and falls asleep with his 
hands folded upon his stomach murmuring, 
"•survival of the fittest.'^ 

Anybody who will look at the thing candidly, 
will see that the evolutionary explanation of 
morals is meaningless, and presupposes the ex- 
istence of the very thing it ought to prove. It 
starts from a misconception of the biological 
doctrine. Biology has nothing to say as to 
what ought to survive and what ought not to 
survive ; it merely speaks of what does survive. 
The burdock easily kills the violet, and the 
Canadian skunk lingers where the humming- 
bird has died. In biology the test of fitness 
to survive is the fact of the survival itself — 
nothing else. To apply this doctrine to the 
moral field brings out grotesque results. The 
successful burglar ought to be presented by so- 
ciety with a nickel-plated "jimmy," and the 

57 



Essays and Literary Studies 

starving cripple left to die In the ditch. Every- 
thing — any phase of movement or religion — 
which succeeds, Is right. Anything which does 
not Is wrong. Everything which Is, Is right; 
everything which was. Is right; everything 
which will be, Is right. All we have to do Is 
to sit still and watch It come. This Is moral 
evolution. 

On such a basis, we might expect to find, as 
the general outcome of the new moral code 
now In the making, the simple worship of suc- 
cess. This Is exactly what Is happening. The 
morality which the Devil with his oyster fork 
was commissioned to Inculcate was essentially 
altruistic. Things were to be done for other 
people. The new Ideas, If you combine them 
In a sort of moral amalgam — to develop one^s 
self, to evolve, to measure things by their suc- 
cess — weigh on the other side of the scale. 
So it comes about that the scale begins to turn 
and the new morality shows signs of exalting 
the old-fashioned Badness In place of the dis- 
credited Goodness. Hence we find, saturating 
our contemporary literature, the new worship 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

of the Strong Man, the easy pardon of the Un- 
scrupulous, the Apotheosis of the Jungle, and 
the Deification of the Detective. Force, brute 
force, is what we now turn to as the moral 
ideal, and Mastery and Success are the sole tests 
of excellence. The nation cuddles its multi- 
millionaires, cinematographs itself silly with 
the pictures of its prize fighters, and even casts 
an eye of slantwise admiration through the 
bars of its penitentiaries. Beside these things 
the simple Good Man of the older dispensa- 
tion, with his worn alpaca coat and his obvious 
inefficiency, is nowhere. 

Truly, if we go far enough with it, the Devil 
may come to his own again, and more than his 
own, not merely as Head Stoker but as what 
is called an End in Himself. 

I knew a little man called Bliggs. He 
worked in a railroad office, a simple, dusty, lit- 
tle man, harmless at home and out of it till 
he read of Napoleon and heard of the thing 
called a Superman. Then somebody told him 
of Nitch, and he read as much Nitch as he 
could understand. The thing went to his head. 

59 



Essays and Literary Studies 

Morals were no longer for him. He used to 
go home from the office and be a Superman 
by the hour, curse if his dinner was late, and 
strut the length of his little home with a silly 
irritation which he mistook for moral enfran- 
chisement. Presently he took to being a Super- 
man in business hours, and the railroad dis- 
missed him. They know nothing of Nitch in 
such crude places. It has often seemed to me 
that Bliggs typified much of the present moral 
movement. 

Our poor Devil then is gone. We cannot 
have him back for the whistling. For genera- 
tions, as yet unlearned in social philosophy, he 
played a useful part — a dual part in a way, 
for it was his function to illustrate at once the 
pleasures and the penalties of life. Merriment 
in the scheme of things was his, and for those 
drawn too far in pleasure and merriment, retri- 
bution and the oyster fork. 

I can see him before me now, his long, eager 
face and deep-set, brown eyes, pathetic with 
the failure of ages — carrying with him his pack 
of cards, his amber flask, and his little fiddle. 

60 



The Devil and the Deep Sea 

Let but the door of the cottage stand open 
upon a winter night, and the Devil would blow 
in, offering his flask and fiddle, or rattling his 
box of dice. 

So with his twin incentives of pain and plea- 
sure he coaxed and prodded humanity on its 
path, till it reached the point where it repudi- 
ated him, called itself a Superman, and headed 
straight for the cliff over which is the deep 
sea. Quo vadimusf 



61 



LITERATURE AND EDU- 
CATION IN AMERICA 



///. — Literature and Education in 
America 

IT may be well to remind the reader at the 
outset of this article that Canada is in 
America. A Canadian writer may there- 
fore with no great impropriety use the 
term American, for want of any other word, 
in reference to the literature and education of 
all the English-speaking people between the 
Rio Grande and the North Pole. There is, 
moreover, a certain warrant of fact for such a 
usage. Canadian literature, — as far as there 
is such a thing, — Canadian journalism, and the 
education and culture of the mass of the peo- 
ple of Canada approximates more nearly to the 
type and standard of the United States than 
to those of Great Britain. Whatever accusa- 
tions may be brought against the literature and 
education of the American republic apply 
equally well — indeed very probably apply with 

65 



Essays and Literary Studies 

even greater force — to the Dominion of Can- 
ada. 

This modest apology may fittingly be of- 
fered before throwing stones at the glass house 
in which both the Canadians and the Ameri- 
cans proper dwell. 

Now it is a fact which had better be candidly 
confessed than indignantly denied that up to 
the present time the contribution of America 
to the world's great literature has been disap- 
pointingly small. There are no doubt great 
exceptions. We number at least some of the 
world's great writers on this side of the At- 
lantic. American humour, In reputation at any 
rate, may claim equality if not pre-eminence. 
And the signs are not wanting — they are seen 
in the intense realism of our short stories, and 
the concentrated power of our one-act plays, — 
that we may some day come into our own. But 
in spite of this, the indictment holds good that 
up to the present we have fallen far short of 
what might have been properly expected of our 
civilisation. 

66 



Literature and Education in America 

I am quite aware that on this point I shall 
meet denial at the outset. 

I once broached this question of the relative 
inferiority of the literary output of America 
to that of the old world to a gentleman from 
Kentucky. He answered, ''I am afraid, sir, you 
are imperfectly acquainted with the work of 
our Kentucky poets." In the same way a friend 
of mine from Maryland has assured me that 
immediately before the war that State had wit- 
nessed the most remarkable literary develop- 
ment recorded since the time of Plato. I am 
also credibly informed that the theological es- 
sayists of Prince Edward Island challenge com- 
parison with those of any age. It is no doubt 
not the fault of the Islanders that this chal- 
lenge has not yet been accepted. But I am 
speaking here not of that literature which, 
though excellent in its way, is known only to 
the immediate locality which it adorns, but 
rather of those works of such eminent merit 
and such wide repute as to be properly classed 
among the literature of the world. To what 
a very small share of this, during the last hun- 

67 



Essays and Literary Studies 

dred years of our history, can we In America 
lay claim. 

This phenomenon becomes all the more re- 
markable when we reflect upon the unparalleled 
advance that has been made in this country in 
the growth of population, in material resources, 
and in the purely mechanical side of progress. 
Counted after the fashion of the census taker, 
which is our favourite American method of 
computation, we now number over a hundred 
million souls. It is some seventy years since 
our rising population equalled and passed that 
of the British Isles : a count of heads, dead and 
alive, during the century would show us more 
numerous than the British people by two to 
one: we erect buildings fifty stories high: we 
lay a mile of railroad track in twenty-four 
hours: the corn that we grow and the hogs 
that we raise are the despair of aristocratic 
Europe ; and yet when it comes to the produc- 
tion of real literature, the benighted people of 
the British Islands can turn out more of it in 
a twelvemonth than our hundred million souls 
can manufacture in three decades. 

68 



Literature and Education in America 

For proof of this, If proof is needed, one has 
but to consider fairly and dispassionately the 
record of the century. How few are the names 
of first rank that we can offer to the world. 
In poetry Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Whit- 
tier, Whitman, with two or three others exhaust 
the list : of historians of the front rank we have 
Bancroft, Motley, Prescott and in a liberal 
sense, Francis Parkman: of novelists, tale writ- 
ers and essayists we can point with pride to 
Irving, Poe, Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, 
James and some few others as names that are 
known to the world: of theologians we have 
Colonel Ingersoll, Mrs. Eddy, and Caroline 
Nation. But brilliant as many of these writers 
are, can one for a moment compare them with 
the imposing list of the great names that adorn 
the annals of British literature In the nineteenth" 
century? Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shel- 
ley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne are 
household names to every educated American. 
Novelists and tale writers such as Dickens, 
Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, Kipling, and 
Stevenson cannot be matched In our country. 

69 



Essays and Literary Studies 

How seldom are essayists and historians of the 
class of Carlyle, Macaulay, Gibbon, Green, 
Huxley, Arnold, Morley, and Bryce produced 
among our hundred million of free and en- 
lightened citizens. These and a hundred other 
illustrious names spring to one's mind to illus- 
trate the splendour of British literature in the 
nineteenth century. But surely it is unfair to 
ourselves to elaborate needlessly so plain a 
point. The candid reader will be fain to admit 
that the bulk of the valuable literature of the 
English-speaking peoples written within the 
last hundred years has been produced within 
the British Isles. 

Nor can we plead in extenuation that inspira- 
tion has been lacking to us. Indeed the very 
contrary is the case. What can be conceived 
more stimulating to the poetic imagination than, 
the advance of American civilisation into the 
broad plains of the Mississippi and the Sas- 
katchewan, the passage of the unknown moun- 
tains and the descent of the treasure seekers 
upon the Eldorado of the coast? What finer 
background for literature than the silent un- 

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Literature and Education in America 

travelled forests and the broad rivers moving 
to unknown seas? In older countries the land- 
scape is known and circumscribed. Parish 
church, and village, and highway succeed one 
another in endless alternation. There is noth- 
ing to discover, no untraversed country to pene- 
trate. There is no mystery beyond. Thus if 
the old world is rich in history, rich in asso- 
ciations that render the simple compass of a 
village green a sacred spot as the battleground 
of long ago, so too is the new world rich in 
the charm and mystery of the unknown, and 
in the lofty stimulus that comes from the un- 
broken silence of the primeval forest. It was 
within the darkness of ancient woods that the 
spirits were first conceived in the imagination 
of mankind and that literature had its birth. 
A Milton or a Bunyan, that could dream dreams 
and see visions within the prosaic streets of an 
English country town — would such a man have 
found no inspiration could he have stood at 
night where the wind roars among the pine for- 
ests of the Peace, or where the cold lights of 
the Aurora illumine the endless desolation of 

71 



Essays and Literary Studies 

the north ? But alas, the Miltons and the Bun- 
yans are not among us. The aspect of prime- 
val nature does not call to our minds the vision 
of Unseen Powers riding upon the midnight 
blast. To us the midnight blast represents an 
enormous quantity of horse-power going to 
waste; the primeval forest is a first-class site 
for a saw mill, and the leaping cataract tempts 
us to erect a red-brick hydro-electric establish- 
ment on its banks and make it leap to some 
purpose. 

The fact of the matter is that despite our 
appalling numerical growth and mechanical 
progress, despite the admirable physical ap- 
pliances offered by our fountain pens, our pulp- 
wood paper, and our linotype press, the prog- 
ress of literature and the general diffusion of 
literary appreciation on this continent is not 
commensurate with the other aspects of our 
social growth. Our ordinary citizen in Ameri- 
ca is not a literary person. He has but little 
instinct towards letters, a very restricted esti- 
mation of literature as an art, and neither envy 
nor admiration for those who cultivate it. A 

72 



Literature and Education in America 

book for him means a thing by which the strain 
on the head is relieved after the serious busi- 
ness of the day and belongs in the same general 
category as a burlesque show or a concertina 
solo: general information means a general 
knowledge of the results of the last election, 
and philosophical speculation is represented by 
speculation upon the future of the Democratic 
party. Education is synonymous with ability 
to understand the stock-exchange page of the 
morning paper, and culture means a silk hat 
and the habit of sleeping in pyjamas. 

Not the least striking feature in the literary 
sterility of America is the fact that we are, 
at any rate as measured by any mechanical 
standard, a very highly educated people. If 
education can beget literature, it is here in 
America that the art of letters should most 
chiefly flourish. In no country in the world 
is more time, more thought, and more money 
spent upon education than in America. School 
books pour from our presses in tons. Man- 
uals are prepared by the million, for use either 
with or without a teacher, manuals for the deaf, 

73 



Essays and Literary Studies 

manuals for the dumb, manuals for the defi- 
cient, for the half-deficient, for the three-quar- 
ters deficient, manuals of hygiene for the feeble 
and manuals of temperance for the drunk. In- 
struction can be had orally, vocally, verbally, 
by correspondence or by mental treatment. 
Twelve miUion of our children are at school. 
The most skilful examiners apply to them every 
examination that human cruelty can invent or 
human fortitude can endure. In higher educa- 
tion alone thirty-five thousand professors lecture 
unceasingly to three hundred thousand students. 
Surely so vast and complicated a machine might 
be expected to turn out scholars, poets, and 
men of letters such as the world has never seen 
before. Yet it is surprising that the same un- 
literary, anti-literary tendency that is seen 
throughout our whole social environment, mani- 
fests itself also in the peculiar and distorted 
form given in our higher education and in the 
singular barrenness of its results. 

There can be no greater contrast than that 
offered by the system of education in Great 
Britain, broad and almost planless in its out- 

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Literature and Education in America 

line, yet admirable in its results and the care- 
fully planned and organised higher education 
of America. The one, in some indefinable way, 
fosters, promotes, and develops the true in- 
stinct of literature. It puts a premium upon 
genius. It singles out originality and mental 
power and accentuates natural Inequality, car- 
ing less for the commonplace achievements of 
the many than for the transcendent merit of 
the few. The other system absurdly attempts 
to reduce the whole range of higher attainment 
to the measured and organised grinding of a 
mill: it undertakes to classify ability and to 
measure intellectual progress with a yard meas- 
ure, and to turn out In its graduates a "stand- 
ardised" article similar to steel rails or struc- 
tural beams, with interchangeable parts in their 
brains and all of them purchasable in the mar- 
ket at the standard price. 

The root of the matter and Its essential bear- 
ing upon the question of literary development 
in general is that the two systems of education 
take their start from two entirely opposite 
points of view. 

75 



Essays and Literary Studies 

The older view of education, which is rap- 
idly passing away in America, but which is still 
dominant in the great Universities of Eng- 
land, aimed at a wide and humane culture of the 
intellect. It regarded the various departments 
of learning as forming essentially a unity, some 
pursuit of each being necessary to the intelli- 
gent comprehension of the whole, and a rea- 
sonable grasp of the whole being necessary to 
the appreciation of each. It is true that the 
system followed in endeavouring to realise this 
ideal took as its basis the literature of Greece 
and Rome. But this was rather made the start- 
ing point for a general knowledge of the liter- 
ature, the history and the philosophy of all 
ages than regarded as offering in itself the final 
goal of education. 

Now our American system pursues a different 
path. It breaks up the field of knowledge into 
many departments, subdivides these into spe- 
cial branches and sections, and calls upon the 
scholar to devote himself to a microscopic ac- 
tivity in some part of a section of a branch of 
a department of the general field of learning. 

76 



Literature and Education in America 

This specialised system of education that we 
pursue does not of course begin at once. Any 
system of training must naturally first devote 
itself to the acquiring of a rudimentary knowl- 
edge of such elementary things as reading, 
spelling, and the humbler* aspects of mathe- 
matics. But the further the American student 
proceeds the more this tendency to specialisa- 
tion asserts itself. When he enters upon what 
are called post-graduate studies, he is expected 
to become altogether a specialist, devoting his 
whole mind to the study of the left foot of the 
garden frog, or to the use of the ablative in 
Tacitus, or to the history of the first half hour 
of the Reformation. As he continues on his 
upward way, the air about him gets rarer and 
rarer, his path becomes more and more solitary 
until he reaches, and encamps upon, his own lit- 
tle pinnacle of refined knowledge staring at his 
feet and ignorant of the world about him, the 
past behind him, and the future before him. 
At the end of his labours he publishes a useless 
little pamphlet called his thesis which is new 
in the sense that nobody ever wrote it before, 

77 



Essays and Literary Studies 

and erudite in the sense that nobody will ever 
read it. Meantime the American student's ig- 
norance of all things except his own part oif his 
own subject has grown colossal. The unused 
parts of his intellect have ossified. His interest 
in general literature, his power of original 
thought, indeed his wish to think at all, is far 
less than it was in the second year of his under- 
graduate course. More than all that, his in- 
terestingness to other people has completely de- 
parted. Even with his fellow scholars so-called 
he can find no common ground of intellectual 
intercourse. If three men sit down together 
and one is a philologist, the second a numisma- 
tist, and the third a subsection of a conchologist, 
what can they find to talk about? 

I have had occasion in various capacities to 
see something of the working of this system of 
the higher learning. Some years ago I resided 
for a month or two with a group of men who 
were specialists of the type described, most 
of them in pursuit of their degree of Doctor of 
Philosophy, some of them — easily distinguished 
by their air of complete vacuity — already in 

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Literature and Education in America 

possession of it. The first night I dined with 
them, I addressed to the man opposite me some 
harmless question about a recent book that I 
thought of general interest. "I don't know 
anything about that," he answered, "I'm in 
sociology." There was nothing to do but to beg 
his pardon and to apologise for not having no- 
ticed it. 

Another of these same men was studying 
classics on the same plan. He was engaged in 
composing a doctor's thesis on the genitive of 
value in Plautus. For eighteen months past he 
had read nothing but Plautus. The manner 
of his reading was as follows: first he read 
Plautus all through and picked out all the verbs 
of estimating followed by the genitive, then 
he read it again and picked out the verbs of 
reckoning, then the verbs of wishing, praying, 
cursing, and so on. Of all these he made lists 
and grouped them into little things called Ta- 
bles of Relative Frequency, which, when com- 
pleted, were about as interesting, about as use- 
ful, and about as easy to compile as the list of 
wholesale prices of sugar at New Orleans. 

79 



Essays and Literary Studies 

Yet this man's thesis was admittedly the best 
in his year, and it was considered by his instruc- 
tors that had he not died immediately after 
graduation, he would have lived to publish 
some of the most daring speculations on the 
genitive of value in Plautus that the world has 
ever seen. 

I do not here mean to imply that all our schol- 
ars of this type die, or even that they ought to 
die, immediately after graduation. Many of 
them remain alive for years, though their util- 
ity has of course largely departed after their 
thesis is complete. Still they do and can re- 
main alive. If kept in a dry atmosphere and 
not exposed to the light, they may remain in 
an almost perfect state of preservation for 
years after finishing their doctor's thesis. I 
remember once seeing a specimen of this kind 
enter into a country post-office store, get his let- 
ters, and make a few purchases, closely scru- 
tinised by the rural occupants. When he had 
gone out the postmaster turned to a friend with 
the triumphant air of a man who has informa- 
tion in reserve and said, ''Now wouldn't you 

80 



Literature and Education in America 



think, to look at him, that man was a d- 



fool?" ^'Certainly would," said the friend, 
slowly nodding his head. "Well, he isn't," said 
the postmaster emphatically; "he's a Doctor of 
Philosophy." But the distinction was too subtle 
for most of the auditors. 

In passing these strictures upon our Ameri- 
can system of higher education, I do not wish 
to be misunderstood. One must of course ad- 
mit a certain amount of specialisation in study. 
It is quite reasonable that a young man with a 
particular aptitude or inclination towards mod- 
ern languages, or classical literature, or political 
economy, should devote himself particularly to 
that field. But what I protest against is the 
idea that each of these studies is apt with us 
to be regarded as wholly exclusive of the others, 
and that the moment a man becomes a student 
of German literature he should lose all inter- 
est in general history and philosophy, and be 
content to remain as ignorant of political econ- 
omy or jurisprudence as a plumber. The price 
of liberty, it has been finely said, is eternal 
vigilance, and I think one may say that the 

8i 



Essays and Literary Studies 

price of real intellectual progress is eternal 
alertness, an increasing and growing interest 
in all great branches of human knowledge. Art 
is notoriously long and life is infamously short. 
We cannot know everything. But we can at 
least pursue the ideal of knowing the greatest 
things in all branches of knowledge, something 
at least of the great masters of literature, some- 
thing of the best of the world's philosophy, and 
something of its political conduct and structure. 
It is but little that the student can ever know, 
but we can at least see that the little is wisely 
distributed. 

And here perhaps it is necessary to make a 
further qualification to this antagonism of the 
principle of specialisation. I quite admit its 
force and purpose as applied to such things 
as natural science and medicine. These are 
branches capable of isolation from the humani- 
ties in general, and in them progress is not de- 
pendent on the width of general culture. Here 
it is necessary that a certain portion of the 
learned world should isolate themselves from 
mankind, immure themselves in laboratories, 

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Literature and Education in America 

testing, dissecting, weighing, probing, boiling, 
mixing, and cooking to their heart's content. 
It is necessary for the world's work that they 
should do so. In any case this is real research 
work done by real specialists after their educa- 
tion and not as their education. Of this work 
the so-called researches of the graduate student, 
who spends three years in writing a thesis on 
John Milton's god-mother, Is a mere parody. 

Nor is it to be thought that this post-gradu- 
ate work upon the preparation of a thesis, this 
so-called original scholarship is difficult. It is 
pretentious, plausible, esoteric, cryptographic, 
occult, if you will, but difficult It is not. It is 
of course laborious. It takes time. But the 
amount of intellect called for in the majority 
of these elaborate compilations is about the 
same, or rather less, than that involved in post- 
ing the day book in a village grocery. The 
larger part of it is on a level with the ordinary 
routine clerical duties performed by a young 
lady stenographer for ten dollars a week. One 
must also quite readily admit that just as there 
is false and real research, so too is there such a 

83 



Essays and Literary Studies 

thing as a false and make-believe general educa- 
tion. Education, I allow, can be made so broad 
that it gets thin, so extensive that it must be 
shallow. The educated mind of this type be- 
comes so wide that it appears quite flat. Such 
is the education of the drawing-room conversa- 
tionalist. Thus a man may acquire no little 
reputation as a classical scholar by constant 
and casual reference to Plato or Diodorus 
Siculus without in reality having studied any- 
thing more arduous than the Home Study Cir- 
cle of his weekly paper. Yet even such a man, 
pitiable though he is, may perhaps be viewed 
with a more indulgent eye than the ossified 
specialist. 

It is of course not to be denied that there is 
even in the field of the humanities a certain 
amount of investigation to be done — of re- 
search work, if one will — of a highly special- 
ised character. But this is work that can best 
be done not by way of an educational training 
— for its effect is usually the reverse of edu- 
cational, but as a special labour performed for 
its own sake as the life work of a trained schol- 

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Literature and Education in America 

ar, not as the examination requirement of a 
prospective candidate. The pretentious claim 
made by so many of our universities that the 
thesis presented for the doctor's degree must 
represent a distinct contribution to human 
knowledge will not stand examination. Dis- 
tinct contributions to human knowledge are not 
so easily nor so mechanically achieved. Nor 
should it be thought either that, even where an 
elaborate and painstaking piece of research has 
been carried on by a trained scholar, such an 
achievement should carry with it any recogni- 
tion of a very high order. It is useful and 
meritorious no doubt, but the esteem in which 
it is held in the academic world in America in- 
dicates an entirely distorted point of view. 
Our American process of research has led to 
an absurd admiration of the mere collection 
of facts, extremely useful things in their way 
but in point of literary eminence standing in 
the same class as the Twelfth Census of the 
United States or the Statistical Abstract of the 
United Kingdom. So it has come to pass that 
the bulk of our college-made books are little 

85 



Essays and Literary Studies 

more than collections of material out of which 
in the hands of a properly gifted person a book 
might be made. In our book-making in Amer- 
ica — our serious book-making, I mean — the 
whole art of presentation, the thing that ought 
to be the very essence of literature, is sadly 
neglected. *'A fact," as Lord Bryce once said 
in addressing the assembled historians of Amer- 
ica, ''is an excellent thing and you must have 
facts to write about; but you should realise that 
even a fact before it is ready for presentation 
must be cut and polished like a diamond.'* 
"You need not be afraid to be flippant," said 
the same eminent authority, "but you ought to 
have a horror of being dull." Unfortunately 
our American college-bred authors cannot be 
flippant if they try: it is at best but the lumber- 
ing playfulness of the elephant, humping his 
heavy posteriors in the air and wiggling his 
little tail in the vain attempt to be a lamb. 

The head and front of the indictment thus 
presented against American scholarship is seen 
in its results. It is not making scholars in the 
highest sense of the term. It is not encourag- 

86 



Literature and Education in America 

ing a true culture. It is not aiding in the crea- 
tion of a real literature. The whole bias of 
it is contrary to the development of the highest 
intellectual power: it sets a man of genius to 
a drudging task suitable to the capacities of 
third-class clerk, substitutes the machine-made 
pedant for the man of letters, puts a premium 
on painstaking dulness and breaks down genius, 
inspiration, and originality in the grinding rou- 
tine of the college tread-mill. Here and there, 
as is only natural, conspicuous exceptions ap- 
pear in the academic world of America. A 
New England professor has invested the dry 
subject of government with a charm that is 
only equalled by the masterly comprehensive- 
ness of his treatment: a Massachusetts philoso- 
pher held for a lifetime the ear of the edu- 
cated world, and an American professor has 
proved that even so abstruse a subject as the 
history of political philosophy can be presented 
in a form at once powerful and fascinating. 

But even the existence of these brilliant ex- 
ceptions to the general rule cannot invalidate 
the proposition that the effect of our American 

87 



Essays and Literary Studies 

method upon the cycle of higher studies is de- 
pressing In the extreme. History Is dwindling 
into fact lore and Is becoming the science of 
the almanac; economics Is being burled alive 
in statistics and is degenerating Into the science 
of the census ; literature is stifled by philology, 
and Is little better than the science of the 
lexicographer. 

Nor Is It only In the higher ranges of educa- 
tion and book-making that the same abiding ab- 
sence of general literary spirit Is manifest In 
American life. For below, or at least parallel 
with the universities we have the equally not- 
able case of our American newspapers and 
journals. In nearly all of these the art of writ- 
ing is relegated entirely to the background. 
Our American newspapers and journals (with 
certain notable and honourable exceptions) are 
not written ''upwards'' (so to speak) as if seek- 
ing to attain the ideal of an elevated literary 
excellence, but "downward," so as to catch the 
ear and capture the money of the crowd. Here 
obtrudes himself the everlasting American man 
with the dinner pail, admirable as a political 

88 



Literature and Education in America 

and industrial institution but despicable as the 
touch-stone of a national literature. Our news- 
papers must be written down to his level. Our 
poetry must be put in a form that he can under- 
stand. Our sonnets must be tuned to suit his 
ear. Our editorials must speak his own tongue. 
Otherwise he will not spend his magical one 
cent and our newspaper cannot circulate. Hence 
it is that the bulk of our current journalistic lit- 
erature is strictly a one-cent literature. This 
is the situation that has evolved that weird 
being called the American Reporter, tireless 
in his activity, omnipresent, omnivorous, and 
omni-ignorant. He is out looking for facts, 
but of the art of presenting them with either 
accuracy or attraction he is completely inno- 
cent. He has just enough knowledge of short- 
hand to be able completely to mystify himself; 
and in deciphering his notes of events, speeches, 
and occurrences, to fall back upon his general 
education would be like falling back upon a 
cucumber frame. 

I cannot do better to illustrate the amount 
of literary power possessed by the American 

89 



Essays and Literary Studies 

reporter than to take an actual illustration or 
at any rate one that is as good as actual. I 
will take a selection from President Lincoln's 
Second Inaugural Address and will present it 
first as Lincoln is known to have written it, and 
secondly as the Washington reporters of the 
day are certain to have reported It. Here is 
the original: — "Fondly do we hope, fervently 
do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war 
may soon pass away. Yet if God wills that 
it continue until all the wealth piled by the 
bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of un- 
requited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop 
of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with 
another drawn with the sword; as was said 
three thousand years ago, so still it must be 
said, *the judgments of the Lord are true and 
righteous altogether.' " 

Here is the reproduction of the above at the 
hands of the American reporter, piecing out his 
meagre knowledge of stenography by the use 
of his still more meagre literary ability: "Mr. 
Lincoln then spoke at some length upon the gen- 
eral subject of prayer. He said that prayer 

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Literature and Education in America 

was fond and foolish, but that war would 
scourge It out. War was a nightly scourge. 
It would pile up two hundred and fifty million 
dollars of unpaid bonds. He recommended the 
lash as the most appropriate penalty, and con- 
cluded by expressing his opinion that the judg- 
ments of the Lord were altogether ridiculous." 
The ultimate psychology of this decided ab- 
sence of literary power in our general Intellec- 
tual development would be difficult to appre- 
ciate. It may be that the methods adopted in 
our education are a consequence rather than a 
cause, and it may well be also that, even if our 
educative system Is a contributory factor, other 
causes of great potency are operative at the 
same time. One of these no doubt Is found in 
the distinct bias of our whole American life 
towards commercialism. The vastly greater 
number of us in America have always been 
under the shameful necessity of earning our 
own living. This has coloured all our thinking 
with the yellow tinge of the dollar. Social and 
intellectual values necessarily undergo a pecul- 
iar readjustment among a people to whom indi- 

91 



Essays and Literary Studies 

vidually the "main chance" Is necessarily every- 
thing. Thus It Is that with us everything tends 
to find itself "upon a business basis." Organi- 
sation and business methods are obtruded every- 
where. Public enthusiasm is replaced by the 
manufactured hysteria of the convention. The 
old-time college president, such as the one of 
Harvard who lifted up his voice in prayer 
in the twilight of a summer evening over the 
"rebels" that were to move on Bunker Hill 
that night, is replaced by the Modern Business 
President, alert and brutal in his methods, and 
himself living only on sufferance after the age 
of forty years. A good clergyman with us must 
be a hustler. The only missionary we care for 
is an advertiser, and even the undertaker must 
send us a Christmas calendar if he desires to 
retain our custom. Everything with us is' 
"run" on business lines from a primary election 
to a prayer meeting. Thus business, and the 
business code, and business principles become 
everything. Smartness is the quality most de- 
sired, pecuniary success the goal to be achieved. 
Hence all less tangible and provable forms 

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Literature and Education in America 

of human merit, and less tangible aspirations 
of the human mind are rudely shouldered aside 
by business ability and commercial success. 
There follows the apotheosis of the business 
man. He is elevated to the post of national 
hero. His most stupid utterances are taken 
down by the American Reporter, through the 
prism of whose intellect they are refracted with 
a double brilliance and inscribed at large in the 
pages of the one-cent press. The man who or- 
ganises a soap-and-glue company is called a na- 
tion builder; a person who can borrow enough 
money to launch a Distiller's Association is 
named an empire maker, and a man who re- 
mains in business until he is seventy-five with- 
out getting into the penitentiary Is designated 
a Grand Old Man. 

But It may well be that there Is a reason for 
our literary inferiority lying deeper still than 
the commercial environment and the existence 
of an erroneous educational Ideal, which are 
but things of the surface. It Is possible that 
after all literature and progress-happiness-and- 
equality are antithetical terms. Certain it is 

93 



Essays and Literary Studies 

that the world's greatest literature has arisen 
in the darkest hours of its history. More than 
one of the masterpieces of the past were writ- 
ten in a dungeon. It is perhaps conceivable 
that literature has arisen in the past mainly on 
the basis of the inequalities, the sufferings and 
the misery of the common lot that has led hu- 
manity to seek in the concepts of the imagina- 
tion the happiness that seemed denied by the 
stern environment of reality. Thus perhaps 
American civilisation with its public school and 
the dead level of its elementary instruction, 
with its simple code of republicanism and its 
ignorance of the glamour and mystery of mon- 
archy, with its bread and work for all and 
its universal hope of the betterment of per- 
sonal fortune, contains in itself an atmosphere 
In which the flower of literature cannot live. 
It is at least conceivable that this flower blos- 
soms most beautifully in the dark places of the 
world, among that complex of tyranny and hero- 
ism, of inexplicable cruelty and sublime suffer- 
ing that is called history. Perhaps this literary 
sterility of America is but the mark of the new 

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Literature and Education in America 

era that Is to come not to America alone, but 
to the whole of our western civilisation; the 
era in which humanity, fed to satiety and housed 
and warmed to the point of somnolence, with 
Its wars abolished and its cares removed, may 
find that it has lost from among it that supreme 
gift of literary inspiration which was the com- 
forter of its darker ages. 



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AMERICAN HUMOUR 



IV. — American Humour 

ESSAYS upon American Humour, after 
an Initial effort towards the dignity and 
severity of literary criticism, generally 
resolve themselves into the mere narra- 
tion of American jokes and stories. The fun 
of these runs thinly towards Its impotent con- 
clusion, till the disillusioned reader detects be- 
hind the mask of the literary theorist the anx- 
ious grin of the second-hand story-teller. It 
is the aim of the present writer to effect some- 
thing more than this, and to offer a contribu- 
tion, however humble, to the theory of aesthet- 
ics, and a study of those national characteristics 
which are associated with the particular domain 
of the aesthetics in question. 

The following essay is therefore intended to 
present a serious analysis of American humour 
as an art, and to discuss Its relation to the char- 
acter and history of the people among whom 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

It has originated. In such a discussion it may 
well become necessary to introduce an actual 
citation of typical American jokes: but, where 
this is the case, It is done only in the interests 
of art, and with a proper sense of responsibility. 

This IS a somewhat venturesome task, and 
one for which the limits of the present essay 
are all too brief. The aesthetic theory of the 
humorous has been but little exploited, and 
never satisfactorily explained. It offers an open 
field for the talents of a future philosopher, or 
psychologist, who shall confine himself exclu- 
sively to the comic, and set up for us by his 
analysis the long-needed criterion of what is, 
and what is not, amusing. The philosopher 
who will do this for the domain of mirth will 
not only benefit the theory of aesthetics, but 
may incidentally shed upon his own province 
a not unpleasing Illumination. 

It is not to be implied from this that none 
of the world's great philosophers, such as Kant, 
and Schopenhauer, have dealt with the analysis 
of humour. Several of them have done so, 
and have done so In a spirit which does them 

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American Humour 



credit. Schopenhauer has told us — I cannot 
quote his phrase exactly but merely give the 
rough, every-day sense of his words — that all 
those concepts are amusing in which there is the 
subsumption of a double paradox. This is a 
proposition which none of us will readily deny, 
and one which, if more widely appreciated, 
might prove of the highest practical utility. 
Kant, likewise, has said that in him everything 
excites laughter in which there is a resolution 
or deliverance of the absolute captive by the 
finite. It was very honourable of Kant to ad- 
mit this. It enables us to know exactly what 
did, and what did not, excite him. But the 
difficulty remains that the philosophical school 
of analysts, in their fear of being thought light, 
frivolous, or over-intelligible in dealing with 
this subject have been led to envelop themselves 
in a thick haze of psychological terminology 
which the common eye is unable to pierce. The 
explanation of the humorous proceeds thus ad 
obscurum per ohscurhis. The presentation In 
simple language for simple people of a true 
theory of the ludicrous has yet to be made. 

lOI 



Essays and Literary Studies 

It is perhaps not difficult to understand why 
so few writers have attempted a painstaking 
and scientific analysis of what is humorous. 
There appears to be a sort of intellectual in- 
dignity involved in the serious study of the 
comic. 

Catullus said long ago that "nothing is more 
foolish than a foolish laugh," and a recent* 
French psychologist has added that "laughter 
is often an excellent symptom of intellectual 
poverty." It follows, therefore, that any man 
of attainment is unwilling that his name should 
be unduly associated with the seemingly lighter 
side of intellectual life. He does not deny his 
own appreciation of the humorous. Indeed, 
by a strange inconsistency he shows himself 
highly sensitive in regard to it. Of his other 
faculties he is willing to admit the limitations. 
He is willing to make efforts to cultivate them. 
But his appreciation of humour he regards as 
a natural endowment, perfect in its degree, and 
needing no further cultivation. He even affects 
to consider the professional, or notorious hu- 
morist, with a kindly condescension, not un- 

102 



American Humour 



mixed with contempt. "There are obvious rea- 
sons," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "why all 
reputable authors are ashamed of being funny. 
The clown knows very well that the women 
are not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the 
gloomy fellow yonder in the black coat and the 
plumed hat. The wit knows that his place is 
at the tail of the procession." 

The initial task, then, of explaining the gen- 
eral nature of humour is difficult enough. But, 
^ven if this task were successfully accomplished, 
there remains the further difficulty of rightly 
explaining the essential nature of American hu- 
mour. For this term does not necessarily ap- 
ply to all humorous writings produced in the 
United States. The expression is not a geo- 
graphical one, but ought to indicate certain 
dominant qualities, n^odes of thought and ex- 
pression which mark off a distinctive literary 
product. 

Even from this preliminary survey of the 
ground before us it can be seen that the subject 
under discussion is of no mean importance. 
Still further Is its importance enhanced when 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

one realises the peculiar position occupied by 
American humour in the general body of Amer- 
ican literature. 

In the preceding essay the discussion turned 
upon the relatively small output of literature 
of the highest class upon the continent of Amer- 
ica. Wonderful as our civilisation is on its 
material and practical side, it falls short as 
yet, in regard to literature and general culture, 
of the standard of the great nations of Europe. 
But in this relative literary sterility there has 
been one salient exception, and this exception 
has been found in the province of humorous 
writing. Here at any rate American history, 
and American life, have continuously reflected 
themselves in a not unworthy literary product. 
The humorist has followed, and depicted, the 
progress of our western civilisation at every 
step. Benjamin Franklin has shewn us the hu- 
mour of Yankee commercialism, and Pennsyl- 
vanian piety — the odd resultant of the juxtaposi- 
tion of saintliness and common sense. Irving 
has developed the humour of early Dutch set- 
tlement — ^the mynheers of the Hudson valley, 

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American Humour 



with their long pipes and leisurely routine; 
Hawthorne presents the mingled humour and 
pathos of Puritanism; Hans Breitmann sings 
the ballad of the later Teuton; Lowell, the 
Mexican war, and the Slavery contest; Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, the softer side of the rigid 
culture of Boston; Mark Twain and Bret 
Harte bring with them the new vigour of the 
West; and, at the close of the tale, the sagacious 
Mr. Dooley appears as the essayist of the Irish 
Immigrant, while a brilliant group of ''up-to- 
date" writers — the Ades, the Adamses and the 
Irwins of our contemporary journalism — boldly 
challenge comparison with their predecessors. 
No very lofty literature is this perhaps, yet 
faithful and real of its kind, more truly and 
distinctively American than anything .else pro- 
duced upon the continent. 

All of this has been said but as a somewhat 
overbalanced introduction. Let me now Invite 
my readers to take with me a sudden plunge 
Into the uttermost psychology of the subject," 
comparable, I fear, In Its recklessness with that 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

taken of old time down a steep place Into the 
sea. 

The basis of the humorous, the amusing, the 
ludicrous, lies in the incongruity, the unfitting- 
ness, the want of harmony among things; and 
this incongruity, according to the various stages 
of evolution of human society and of the art 
of speech, may appear in primitive form, or 
may assume a more complex manifestation. 
The crudest and most primitive form of all 
"disharmonies'' is that offered by the aspect 
of something smashed, broken, defeated, 
knocked out of its original shape and purpose. 
Hence it is that Hobbes tells us that the pro- 
totype of human amusement is found in the ex- 
ulting laugh of the savage over his fallen foe 
whose head he has cracked with a club. This 
represents the very origin and fountain source 
of laughter. "The passion of laughter," says 
Hobbes, "springs from a sudden glory arising 
from a conception of some eminence In our- 
selves, as compared with the misfortunes of 
others." It seems but a sad commentary upon 
the history of humanity to think that the orlgl- 

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American Humour 



nal basis of our amusement should appear in 
the form which Is called demoniacal merriment. 
But there Is much to support the view. "The 
pleasure of the ludicrous/' says Plato, "origi- 
nates in the sight of another's misfortune." 
Nay, we have but to consider the cruder forms 
of humour even among civilised people to real- 
ise that the original type still persists. The 
laughter of a street urchin at the sight of a 
fat gentleman slipping on a banana peel, the 
amusement of a child in knocking down nine- 
pins, or demolishing a snow man, the joy of a 
school boy In breaking window panes — all such 
cases Indicate the principle of original demonia- 
cal amusement at work. 

Even in reputable modern literature we can 
find Innumerable examples of merriment of the 
lower type created In this fashion. We are 
all famlhar with Bret Harte's poem about the 
circumstances which terminated the existence 
of the literary society formed at the mining 
camp of Stanislow. The verse In which the 
fun of the poem culminates runs : 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

Then Abner Dean, of Angels, raised a point of order, 
when 
A chunk of old red sandstone hit him in the abdomen. 
And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on 
the floor, 
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no 
more. 

Now this humour of discomfiture, of destruc- 
tiveness and savage triumph may be expected 
to appear not only among a primitive people, 
but also in any case where the settlement of 
a new country reproduces to some extent the 
circumstances of primitive life. One can there- 
fore readily understand that it enters freely 
into the composition of the humour of Ameri- 
can western life. The humour of the Arkansas 
mule, of the bucking broncho, of the Kentucky 
duel, is all of this primitive character. Mark 
Twain's earlier and shorter sketches contain 
much material of this sort. An excellent Illus- 
tration of it Is found In the essay called *'Jour- 
nallsm In Tennessee." The following extract 
therefrom, a little abbreviated for the sake of 
condensation, may be offered In citation: 

io8 



American Humour 



The Editor of the Johnson County Warwhoop was 
dictating an article (to Mark Twain, the Associate 
Editor) on the Encouraging Progress of Moral and 
Intellectual Development in America, when, in the 
midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the 
open window and marred the symmetry of his ear. 
**Ah," he said, "that is that scoundrel, Smith, of the 
Moral Volcano; he was due yesterday." He snatched 
a navy revolver from his belt, and fired. Smith 
dropped, shot in the thigh. The Editor went on with 
his dictation. Just as he finished a hand grenade came 
down the stove pipe, and the explosion shattered the 
stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did no 
other damage than to knock out a couple of my teeth. 
Shortly after, a brick came through the window, and 
gave me a considerable jolt in the back. The chief 
said: "That was the colonel, likely." A moment 
after, the colonel appeared in the doorway with a 
dragoon revolver in his hand. "I have a little account 
to settle with you," he said: "if you are at leisure we 
will begin." Both pistols rang out at the same mo- 
ment. The chief lost a lock of his hair, and the colo- 
nel's bullet ended Its career In my thigh. The colonel's 
left shoulder was chipped a little. They fired again. 
Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a 
shot in the arm. I said I believed I would go out and 
take a walk as this was a private interview. Both gen- 
tlemen begged me to keep my seat. 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

It will of course be readily seen that the 
humorous quality of the above is of a mixed 
character, but the discomfiture of the associate 
editor enters largely into it. 

Now, this primitive form of fun is of a de- 
cidedly anti-social character. It runs counter 
to other instincts, those of affection, pity, un- 
selfishness, upon which the progressive develop- 
ment of the race has largely depended. As a 
consequence of this, the basis of humour tends 
in the course of social evolution to alter its 
original character. It becomes a condition of 
amusement that no serious harm or injury shall 
be inflicted, but that only the appearance or 
simulation of it shall appear. Indeed Plato 
himself adds, as a proviso to the definition 
which I have quoted above, that the misfortune 
which excites mirth in question must involve 
no serious harm. Hence it comes about that 
the sight of a humped back, or a crooked foot, 
is droll only to the mind of a savage or a child; 
while the queer gyrations of a person whose 
foot has gone to sleep, and who tries in vain to 
walk, may excite laughter in the civilised adult 

no 



American Humour 



by affording the appearance of crooked limbs 
without the reality. This is perhaps what Kant 
meant by the resolution of the absolute. On 
the other hand, perhaps it is not. 

When the development of humour reaches 
this stage its basis is shifted from the appear- 
ance of destructiveness and demolition to that 
of the incongruous. Man's advancing view of 
what is harmonious, purposeful and properly 
adjusted to its surroundings begins to cause him 
a sense of intellectual superiority, a tickling of 
amused vanity at the sight of that which misses 
Its mark, which betrays a maladjustment of 
means to end, a departure from the proper 
type of things. The idea of contrast, incon- 
gruity, of the false semblance between the cor- 
rect and the incorrect, becomes the basic prin- 
ciple of the ludicrous. 

To this stage of the development of the ludi- 
crous belongs the amusement one feels at the 
sight of a juggler swallowing yards of tape, or 
of a circus clown wearing a little round hat the 
size of a pill-box. 

Much of the humour of the farce and the 

III 



Essays and Literary Studies 

pantomime, the transformation scene of the 
musical comedy, and the medley of the circus 
ring is of this class. Just why such appearances 
should excite laughter, why the sense of pleas- 
ure experienced should manifest itself In cer- 
tain muscular movements. Is a physiological, 
and not a psychological problem. Herbert 
Spencer tells us that the thing called a laugh Is 
a sort of explosion of nervous energy, disap- 
pointed In Its expected path, and therefore at- 
tacking the muscles of the face. Admirers of 
Spencer's scientific method may find In this 
plausible statement a pleasing finality, though 
why the explosion In question should attack 
the face rather than other parts of the body 
still seems a matter of doubt. 

To this secondary stage of development is 
to be assigned the first appearance of the mode 
of humour called wit. Wit depends upon a 
contrast or Incongruity effected by calling In 
the art of words. "It Is," says Professor Bain, 
"a sudden and unexpected form of humour, 
Involving a play upon words." "Wit," writes 
Walter Pater, "is that unreal and transitory 

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American Humour 



form of mirth, which is like the crackling of 
thorns under a pot." "It consists," says an- 
other modern authority, Mr. Lilly, *'in the dis- 
coveries of incongruities in the province of the 
understanding." If the view here presented 
be correct, wit is properly to be regarded not 
as something contrasted with the humorous but 
offering merely a special and, relatively speak- 
ing, unimportant subdivision of a general mode 
of intellectual operation: it presents a humor- 
ous idea by means of the happy juxtaposition of 
verbal forms. 

Now this principle of intellectual pleasure 
excited by contrast or incongruity, once started 
on an upward path of development, loses more 
and more its anti-social character, until at length 
It appears no longer antagonistic to the social 
feelings, but contributory to them. The final 
stage of the development of humour is reached 
when amusement no longer arises from a single 
''funny" idea, meaningless contrast, or odd play 
upon words, but rests upon a prolonged and 
sustained conception of the incongruities of 
human life itself. The shortcomings of our 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

existence, the sad contrast of our aims and our 
achievements, the little fretting aspiration of 
the day that fades into the nothingness of to- 
morrow, kindle in the mellowed mind a sense 
of gentle amusement from which all selfish 
exultation has been chastened by the realisation 
of our common lot of sorrow. On this higher 
plane humour and pathos mingle and become 
one. To the Creator perhaps in retrospect the 
little story of man's creation and his fall seems 
sadly droll. 

It is of this final stage of the evolution of 
amusement that one of the keenest of modern 
analysts has written thus, — "when men become 
too sympathetic to laugh at each other for in- 
dividual defects or infirmities which once moved 
their mirth, it is surely not strange that sym- 
pathy should then begin to unite them, not in 
common lamentation for their common defects 
and inferiorities, but in common amusement at 
them." This Is the sentiment that has Inspired 
the great masterpieces of humorous literature 
— this is the humour of Cervantes smiling sadly 
at the passing of the older chivalry, and of 

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American Humour 



Hawthorne depicting the sombre melancholies 
of Puritanism against the background of the 
silent woods of New England. This Is the 
really great humour — unquotable In single 
phrases and paragraphs, but producing its ef- 
fect In a long-drawn picture of human life, in 
which the universal element of human imper- 
fection — alike In all ages and places — excites 
at once our laughter and our tears. 

From this general settling of the subject let 
me turn to the more immediate conslderatfon 
of American humour as such, and inquire what 
special sources of contrast and Incongruity, what 
particular modes of thought and expression 
might well be engendered in American life, and 
reflected in American writing. Perhaps the 
most evident, and the most far-reaching, factor 
In the question is the circumstance that we 
Americans are a new people, divorced from the 
traditions, good and bad, of European life, 
and are able thereby to take a highly objective 
view of European Ideas and Institutions. Our 
freedom from the hereditary and conventional 
view has enabled our writers to take an ''out- 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

side" view of things, and to discover many con- 
trasts and incongruities hidden from the Euro- 
pean eye. We have been able to view the 
older civilisation from a distance, and to judge 
it on its merits. The objective view — the de- 
liberate insistence in judging things as they are, 
and not as hallowed tradition interprets them 
— forms the essential "idea" of much of what 
is considered typically Yankee humour. It is 
one of the leading qualities in the humour of 
Franklin's Poor Richard, of Major Downing, 
of Sam Slick and of Hosea Biglow. It is con- 
nected essentially with the development of Yan- 
kee character, and of the Yankee view of the 
outside world. *'A strange hybrid indeed," 
said an English writer half a century ago, "did 
circumstance beget in the new world upon the 
old Puritan stock, and the earth never before 
saw such mystic practicalism, such niggard 
geniality, such calculating fanaticism, such "cast- 
iron enthusiasm, such sour-faced humour, such 
close-fisted generosity." 

This peculiar vein of Yankee character has 
nowhere been better exploited for purposes of 

Ii6 



American Humour 



humour than in James Russell Lowell's Bi^- 
low Papers. Here we have New England 
wisdom detached from the conventional view 
of things ; how complete and surprising this de- 
tachment may sometimes appear is seen in the 
poem on the Mexican war, intended as a pro- 
test against the rampant militarism of the 
Southern expansionists, in which occurs the fol- 
lowing verse : 

We were getting on nicely up here to our village, 

With good old idees o' wut's right and wut ain't, 
We kind o' thought Christ went again' war an' pillage, 
An' that eppylettes worn't the best mark of a saint. 
But John P. 
Robinson, he 
Sez this kind o' thing's an exploded idee. 

A great deal of Mark Twain's humour rests 
upon a similar basis. The humorous contrast 
is found by turning the "artistic innocence" of 
the western eye to bear upon the civilisation of 
the old world. The result is amply seen in 
those two most amusing of American books, 
The Innocents Abroad and the New Pil- 
grims^ Progress. A few words from a preface 

"7 



Essays and Literary Studies 

written by Mr. Hingston for an English 
edition of the "Innocents" admirably develop 
the fundamental basis of the contrast here util- 
ised as a source of humour. 

"From the windows of the newspaper office where 
Mark Twain worked (the office of the Territorial 
Enterprise, of Virginia City, Nevada) the American 
desert was visible : within a radius of ten miles Indians 
were encamped among the sage bush: the whole city 
was populated with miners, adventurers, traders, gam- 
blers and that rough-and-tumble class which a mining 
town in a new territory collects together. He visited 
Europe and Asia without any of the preparations for 
travel which most travellers undertake. His object 
was to see things as they are and record the impres- 
sions they produced upon a man of humorous per- 
ception, who paid his first visit to Europe without a 
travelling tutor, a university education or a stock of 
conventional sentimentality packed in a carpet bag. 
•He looked at objects as an untravelled American might 
be expected to look, and measured men and manners 
by the gauge he had set up for himself among the gold- 
hills of California and the silver mines of half-civilised 
Nevada." 

It will be understood that a humorist enjoy- 
ing the special advantage of so profound an 

Ii8 



American Humour 



ignorance was in a position to make amazing 
discoveries. I regret that the limited space 
at my disposal prevents an elaborate citation 
from Mark Twain's descriptions of Europe. 
But perhaps his reflections upon the old masters 
and their works in the picture galleries of Italy 
may serve as an illustration: 

"The originals," he writes, "were handsome when 
they were new, but they are not new now. The col- 
ours are dim with age; the countenances are scaled 
and marred and nearly all expression is gone from 
them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall. There 
is no life in the eyes. But humble as I am and un- 
pretending in the matter of Art, my researches among 
the painted monks and martyrs have not been wholly 
in vain. I have striven hard to learn. I have had 
some success. I have mastered some things, possibly 
of trifling import in the eyes of the learned but to 
me they give pleasure and I take as much pride in my 
little acquirements as do others who have learned far 
more and who love to display them fully as well. 
When I ,see a monk going about with a lion and look- 
ing tranquilly up to heaven, I know that that is Saint 
Mark. When I see a monk with a book and a pen, 
looking tranquilly up to heaven and trying to think 
of a word, I know that that Is Saint Matthew. When 
I see a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranquilly up 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

to heaven with a human skull beside him and without 
any other baggage, I know that it is St. Jerome. When 
I see other monks looking tranquilly up to heaven but 
having no trademark, I always ask who these parties 
are. I do this because I humbly wish to learn. I 
have seen thirteen thousand St. Jeromes, twenty-two 
thousand St. Marks, sixteen thousand St. Matthews 
and sixty thousand St. Sebastians, together with four 
million of assorted monks undesignated, and I feel en- 
couraged to believe that when I have seen some more 
of these various pictures and had a larger experience 
I shall begin to take a more absorbing interest in them." 

As a subdivision of this Yankee humour 
which finds its starting point in the unprejudiced 
wisdom of the detached mind, is to be reck- 
oned another mode of literary expression char- 
acteristic of the New England cast of thought. 
This is the production of a humorous effect by 
the affectation of a deep simplicity, a literary 
quality which perhaps had its root in the shrewd- 
ness in bargain-driving, highly cultivated among 
a people pious but pecuniary. No one was a 
greater master of this style than Artemus Ward. 
Ward was perhaps a comedian rather than a 
humorist. His early death prevented his leav- 
ing any great literary legacy to the world, but 

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American Humour 



his lectures in New York and London of fifty 
years ago are still held in kindly recollection. 
It was his custom to appear upon the platform 
in what seemed a deep and embarrassed sad-r 
ness; to apologise in a foolish and hesitating 
manner for the miserable little "panorama^' 
lighted with wax candles which was supposed 
to offer the material of his lecture; to regret 
that the moon in the panorama was out of place ; 
then in a shamefaced way to commence a ram- 
bling ^'Lecture upon Africa*' in which, by a sort 
of inadvertence, nothing was said of Africa till 
the concluding sentence, when with a kind of 
idiotic enthusiasm which he knew so well how 
to simulate, he earnestly recommended his au- 
dience to buy maps of Africa, and study them. 
The following little speech made in explanation 
of his panorama may be taken as typical of his 
style: ,^ 

"This picture," he used to say, "is a great work of 
art; it is an oil painting done in petroleum. It is by 
the Old Masters. It was the last thing they did before 
dying. They did this, and then they expired. I wish 
you were nearer to it so that you could see it better. I 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

wish I could take it to your residences, and let you see it 
by daylight. Some of the greatest artists in London 
come here every morning before daylight with lanterns 
to look at it. They say they never saw anything like 
it before, and they hope they never shall again." 

Somewhat similar in conception is the will- 
ful simplicity of his statement, — "I was born 
in Massachusetts, but I think I must have been 
descended from an old Persian family, as my 
elder brother was called Cyrus." On one occa- 
sion he startled a London audience by begin- 
ning his lecture with the words, "Those of you 
who have been in Newgate," — the audience 
broke into laughter; Ward looked at them in 
reproach and added — "and have stayed there 
for any considerable time." Of a cognate char- 
acter is the ultra-simple announcement which 
he printed at the foot of his lecture programme : 
"Mr. Artemus Ward must refuse to be re- 
sponsible for any debts of his own contraction." 

Among more modern writers Mr. Edgar 
Wilson Nye has fully availed himself of this 
truly American principle of the deliberate as- 
sumption of simplicity. The episode of his 

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American Humour 



visit to the Navy Yard in the days before Mr. 
Roosevelt, when the American Navy was 2, 
proper target of national scorn, is a fine ex- 
ample of a humorously wilful misconception of 
the purpose of things : 

"The condition of our navy," says Mr. Nye, "need 
not give rise to any serious apprehension. The yard 
in which it is placed at Brooklyn is enclosed by a high 
brick wall affording it ample protection. A man on 
board the Atlanta at anchor at Brooklyn is quite as 
safe as he would be at home. The guns on board the 
Atlanta are breech loaders; this Is a great improvement 
on the old-style gun, because in former times in case 
of a naval combat, the man who went outside the ship 
to load the gun, while it was raining, frequently con- 
tracted pneumonia.'* 

But let us return from the humour of sim- 
plicity to the main form of Yankee humour of 
which it is a part, the humour based on that 
freedom from traditional ideas and conven- 
tional views, characteristic of a new country. 
It will readily be perceived that, unless sus- 
tained and held in check by the presence at its 
side of an elevated national literature, this form 
of writing easily degenerates. Freedom from 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

convention runs into crudity and coarseness; 
and a tone of cheap vulgarity is introduced cal- 
culated to discredit grievously the literature to 
which it belongs. It is unfortunate that even 
the work of the best American humorists is dis- 
figured in this way. It would be offensive here 
to cite in detail such conspicuous examples as 
the account of the Turkish bath in the Pil- 
grims^ Progress. An excellent example of 
what is meant is offered by Mark Twain's Can- 
nibalism in the Cars. In this little sketch the 
vein of real humour may be obscured in the 
minds of many readers by the gruesomeness of 
the setting. I cite a part of it, not to excite 
laughter, but to illustrate the point under dis- 
cussion. The story is that of a number of Con- 
gressmen, snowed in, in a railway train, and 
after a week of confinement, driven by hunger 
to the awful extremity of choosing one of their 
number to die that the rest may live. The fun 
of the piece is supposed to lie in the contrast 
offered by the awful circumstances of the event, 
and the formal legislative procedure which the 

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American Humour 



Congressmen, trained In American politics, ap- 
ply to the case from sheer force of habit. 

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Richard H. Gaston, of Min- 
nesota, "it can be delayed no longer. We must deter- 
mine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest." 

Mr. John S. Williams, of Illinois, rose and said, 
"Gentlemen, I nominate the Reverend Jas. Sawyer, of 
Tennessee." 

Mr. Wm. R. Adams, of Indiana, said, "I nominate 
Mr. Daniel Slote, of New York." 

Mr. Slote: "Gentlemen, I decline In favour of Mr. 
John A. Van Nastrand, of New Jersey." 

Mr. Van Nastrand: "Gentlemen, I am a stranger 
among you, I have not sought the distinction that has 
been conferred upon me, and I feel a delicacy " 

Mr. Morgan, of Alabama (interrupting) : "I move 
the previous question." The motion was carried. A 
recess of half an hour was then taken, after which Mr. 
Roger, of Missouri, said: 

"Mr. President, I move to amend the motion by 
striking out the name of the Rev. Mr. Sawyer, and 
substituting that of Mr. Lucius Harris, of St. Louis, 
who is well and honourably known to us all. I do 
not wish to be understood as casting the least reflec- 
tion upon the higher character and standing of Mr. 
Sawyer. I respect and esteem him as much as any 
gentleman here: but none of us can be blind to the 
fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that 
we have lain here than any of us." 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

The Chairman: ''What action will the house take 
upon the gentleman's motion?" 

Mr. Halliday, of Virginia: "I move to amend the 
report by further substituting the name of Mr. Har- 
vey Davis of Oregon. It may be urged, gentlemen, 
that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have 
rendered Mr. Davis tough. But, gentlemen, is this a 
time to cavil at toughness? No, gentlemen, bulk is 
vv^hat we desire, — substance, weight, bulk, — these are 
the supreme requisites now — not latent genius or edu- 
cation." 

The amendment was put to the vote and lost. Rev. 
Mr. Sawyer was declared elected. The announcement 
created considerable dissatisfaction among the friends 
of Mr. Harvey Davis, the defeated candidate, and 
there was some talk of demanding a new ballot, but the 
preparations for supper diverted the attention of the 
Harvey Davis faction, and the happy announcement 
that Mr. Sawyer was ready presently drove all ani- 
mosity to the winds. 

We sat down with hearts full of gratitude to the 
finest supper that had blessed our vision for seven 
days. I liked Sawyer. He might have been better 
done perhaps, but he was worthy of all praise. I 
wrote his wife so afterwards. Next morning we had 
Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of 
the finest men I sat down to — handsome, educated, re- 
fined, spoke several languages fluently — a perfect gen- 
tleman. 

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American Humour 



Enough, I think, has been quoted to illustrate 
my meaning and I spare my readers the refer- 
ences to "soup," to "juiciness" and to "flavour," 
in which the subsequent part of the article 
abounds. 

Let us pass on to consider another broad di- 
vision of American humour, the Humour of 
Exaggeration. It is not to be supposed that' 
we Americans hold any monopoly of this mode 
of merriment. It Is at least as old as Herodotus, 
whose efforts deserve all the credit attached to 
a praiseworthy beginning. Nay, even before 
Herodotus we find the humour of monstrous 
exaggeration fully exploited In the primitive 
literature of Norway. "The great giant of the 
Eddas," says one of the Sagas, "sits at the end 
of the world in Eagle's shape, and when he 
flaps his wings all the winds come that blow 
upon man." The suggested parallel to the 
American eagle is too obvious, and I pass it 
by. It Is at least supposable that this element 
of exaggeration entered largely Into all primi- 
tive folk song: It Is likely that many passages 
in Homer, and the Ancients, which to the schol- 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

ars of the day are mere mis-statements of igno- 
rance were greeted in their time by the loud guf- 
faws of barbarian listeners. 

But though there is no monopoly of exag- 
geration in America, the circumstances of our 
country and its growth tend to foster it as a 
national characteristic. The amazing rapidity 
of American progress, and the very bigness of 
our continent, has bred in us a corresponding 
bigness of speech; the fresh air of the western 
country, and the joy of living in the open, has 
inspired us with a sheer exuberant love of lying 
that has set its mark upon our literature. Ex- 
amples of the literary quality thereby inspired 
might be quoted in hundreds, but one or two 
must suffice. An old American newspaper of 
the year 1850 at once illustrates and satirises 
this mode of national thought thus : 

"This is a glorious country. It has longer rivers 
and more of them, and they are muddler and deeper 
and run faster, and rise higher and make more noise 
and fall lower and do more damage than anybody 
else's rivers. It has more lakes and they are bigger 
and deeper and clearer and w^etter than those of any 
other country. Our railway cars are bigger and run 

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American Humour 



faster and pitch off the track oftener, and kill more 
people than all other railway cars in any other country. 
Our steamboats carry bigger loads, are longer and 
broader, burst their boilers oftener and send up their 
passengers higher, and the captains swear harder than 
the captains in any other country. Our men are big- 
ger and longer and, thicker ; can fight harder and faster, 
drink more mean whiskey, chew more bad tobacco than 
in every other country." 

A beautiful illustration of the same vein, not 
altogether unconscious, is found in Daniel Web- 
ster's speech to the citizens of Rochester: 

"Men of Rochester, I am glad to see you. I am 
glad to see your noble city. Gentlemen, I saw your 
falls which I am told are one hundred and fifty feet 
high. This is a very interesting fact. Gentlemen, 
Rome had her Caesar, her Scipio, her Brutus, but Rome 
in her proudest days had never a waterfall a hundred 
and fifty feet high. Gentlemen, Greece had her Peri- 
cles, her Demosthenes and her Socrates, but Greece 
in her palmiest days had never a waterfall a hundred 
and fifty feet high. Men of Rochester, go on." 

It IS notorious that this form of American 
fun has always proved somewhat difficult of 
comprehension to our British cousins. "I was 
prepared," said Artemus Ward in speaking of 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

one of his English audiences, ''for a good deal 
of gloom, but I did not expect to find them so 
completely depressed." It is interesting to note 
that the Right Hon. John Bright, one of the 
auditors of the lecture, said next morning: 
"The information is meagre and is presented 
in a desultory manner: indeed I cannot help 
questioning some of the statements." 

This divergence of national taste Is really 
fundamental in British and American art and 
literature, and it forms the line of division be- 
tween the British and American conception of 
a joke. The Englishman loves what is literal. 
His conception of a "funny picture" is the draw- 
ing of a trivial accident in a hunting field, de- 
picting exactly everything as it happened, with 
the discomfited horseman dripping with water 
from having fallen into a stream; or covered 
with mud by being thrown Into a bog. The 
American funny picture tries to convey the same 
Ideas by exaggeration. It gives us negroes with 
boots that are two feet long, collars six inches 
high and diamonds that shoot streaks of light 
across the paper. The English cartoonist 

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American Humour 



makes a literal drawing. He may draw Mr. 
Winston Churchill as a chimney sweep or a 
nurse-girl or as a bull-terrier but the face Is 
always the face of Mr. Winston Churchill. The 
American cartoonist on the contrary reduces 
Mr. Roosevelt to a set of teeth with spectacles, 
Sir Wilfred Laurler to a lock of hair, and the 
German Kaiser to a pair of moustaches. In 
either case the object sought may be attained 
or missed. British literalism in comic art or 
literature easily fades Into insipid dullness; 
pointless stories of ^'awfully amusing things," 
told just as they happened, make one long for 
the sound of a literary lie. American exaggera- 
tion in comic art runs to seed in the wooden 
symbolism that depicts a skating accident by a 
series of concentric circles. American exaggera- 
tion in literature passes the bounds of common- 
sense, and becomes mere meaningless criminal- 
ity. 

At this point it may be in order to consider 
the question of especially American forms of 
wit. These are certainly not abundant. "We 
have not yet had time," said Josh Billings, 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

*'to boil down our humour, and get the wit out 
of it." There are nevertheless certain forms 
and modes of wit typically American. Most 
notable of these is what may be called the Un- 
restrained Simile, a form closely analogous to 
humorous exaggeration : 

"This miserable man," writes a western editor in 
describing in terms of scorn the personal appearance 
of one of his rivals, "has a pair of legs that look like 
twenty-five minutes after six." "Rats are about as un- 
called for," says Josh Billings, "as a pain in the small 
of the back." "There must be 60 or 70 million rats 
in the United States. Of course I am speaking only 
from memory." 

Not unfrequently these forced comparisons 
become overforced and miss their mark. Wit- 
ness the following: 

"The effeminate man," says Josh Billings, "is a weak 
poultiss. He is a cross between root beer and ginger- 
pop with the cork left out of the bottle overnight. 
He is a fresh vv^ater mermaid lost in a cow pasture 
with his hands filled with dandylions. He is a sick 
monkey with a blonde mustash. He is as harmless as 
a cent's worth of spruce gum and as useless as a shirt 
button without a button hole. He is as lazy as a 

132 



'American Humour 



bread pill, and has no more hope than a last year's 
grass-hopper." 

Another special form of American wit is 
found in the use of ellipsis, as if from ignorance 
or simplicity. A charming example of this is 
seen in a well known telegram sent by, or de- 
clared to have been sent by, Mark Twain : "Ele- 
phant broke loose from circus to-day. Rushed 
madly at two plumbers. It killed one. The 
other escaped. General regret." Closely sim- 
ilar is the mode of speech of which the follow- 
ing quotation from Eli Perkins is an example: 
**An old Maine woman undertook to eat a gal- 
lon of oysters for one hundred dollars. She 
gained fifteen, her funeral costing eighty-five." 

The special forms of American wit offered 
by the various dialects constitute a chapter by 
themselves, but of these the most typical is 
offered by the negro misuse of words, a mode 
of wit fully exploited by the author of Uncle 
Remus and the Southern school: 

"Julius, is yo' better dis morning?" "No, I was 
better yesterday, but Fse got ober dat." "Am dere no 

133 



Essays and Literary Studies 

hopes of yo' discobery?" "Discobery of what?" 
"Discobery from the convalescence what am fetching 
you on yo'r back." "That depends, sah, altogether on 
the prognostication which implies the disease; should 
they continue fatally he hopes dis culled individual 
won't die dis time. But as I said afore, dat all de- 
pends on the prognotics: till dese come to a haid, dere 
am no telling whether dis pusson will come to a dis- 
continuation or otherwise." 

In any literature the forms of wit run easily 
to degeneration into sterile mechanical forms. 
There is an inevitable tendency to confound 
what is difficult with what is amusing. The 
sillier of the mediaeval monks found amusement 
in anagrams, acrostics, and double-ended Latin 
lines which read as foolishly backwards as for- 
wards. The sillier amongst the English people 
take an infantile delight in puns. The corres- 
ponding curse of American humour is bad spell- 
ing. Bad spelling, as Lowell has said, is only 
amusing when it has some ulterior allusion or 
reference. Josh Billings' naif statement — '*I 
spell kaughphy, k-a-u-g-h-p-h-y, and Webster 
spells it coffee, but I don't know which of us is 
right" — may be allowed to pass, but in the ma- 

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American Humour 



jority of cases bad spelling is utterly without 
point and contains no element of the comic. It 
is cheering to realise that the efforts of the 
spelling reform society will henceforth make 
bad spelling a serious matter. 

It has been impossible in this short compass 
to say much of the part of American literature 
which moves upon the highest plane of humour, 
in which the mere incongruous '^funniness" of 
the ludicrous Is replaced by the larger view of 
life. In plain truth not much of what is called 
American humour is of this class. The writ- 
ings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the works of 
Mark Twain (not as cited in single passages 
or jokes, but considered in their broad aspect, 
and in their view of life), and, perhaps more 
than all, the work of O. Henry, whose name will 
stand in retrospect among the greatest, present* 
the universal element. But a large part of 
American humour lacks profundity, and wants 
that stimulating aid of the art of expression 
which can be found only amongst a literary peo- 
ple. The Americans produce humorous writ- 
ing because of their intensely humorous percep- 

135 



Essays and Literary Studies 

tlon of things, and in despite of the fact that 
they are not a literary people. The British peo- 
ple, essentially a people of exceptions, produce 
a high form of humorous literature because of 
their literary spirit, and in spite of the fact 
that their general standard of humorous per- 
ception is lower. In the one case humour forces 
literature. In the other literature forces hu- 
mour. 

One is tempted in such an essay as the pres- 
ent to conclude with a discussion of the writers 
of the immediate moment. But discretion for- 
bids. Criticism is only of value where the lapse 
of a certain time lends perspective to the view. 
Of the brilliance and promise of a number of 
the younger humorists of to-day there can be no 
doubt. But it is difficult to appraise their work 
and to distinguish among a mass of transitory 
effects the elements of abiding value. 



136 



THE WOMAN QUESTION 



V, — The Woman Question 

I WAS sitting the other day In what is called 
the Peacock Alley of one of our leading 
hotels, drinking tea with another thing 
like myself, a man. At the next table 
were a group of Superior Beings in silk, talking. 
I couldn't help overhearing what they said — 
at least not when I held my head a little side- 
ways. 

They were speaking of the war. 
"There wouldn't have been any war," said 
one, "if women were allowed to vote." 
"No, indeed," chorused all the others. 
The woman who had spoken looked about 
her defiantly. She wore spectacles and was of 
the type that we men used to call, in days when 
we still retained a little courage, an Awful 
Woman. 

"When women have the vote," she went on, 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

"there will be no more war. The women will 
forbid if' 

She gazed about her angrily. She evidently 
wanted to be heard. My friend and I hid our- 
selves behind a little fern and trembled. 

But we listened. We were hoping that the 
Awful Woman would explain how war would 
be ended. She didn't. She went on to explain 
instead that when women have the vote there 
will be no more poverty, no disease, no germs, 
no cigarette smoking and nothing to drink but 
water. 

It seemed a gloomy world. 

"Come," whispered my friend, "this is no 
place for us. Let us go to the bar." 

"No," I said, "leave me. I am going to 
write an article on the Woman Question. The 
time has come when it has got to be taken up 
and solved." 

So I set myself to write it. 

The woman problem may be stated some- 
what after this fashion. The great majority of 
the women of to-day find themselves without 
any means of support of their own. I refer 

140 



The Woman Question 



of course to the civilised white women. The 
gay savage In her jungle, attired in a cocoanut 
leaf, armed with a club and adorned with the 
neck of a soda-water bottle. Is all right. 
Trouble hasn't reached her yet. Like all sav- 
ages, she has a far better time, — more varied, 
more interesting, more worthy of a human be- 
ing, — than falls to the lot of the rank and file 
of civilised men and women. Very few of us 
recognise this great truth. We have a mean 
little vanity over our civilisation. We are 
touchy about It. We do not realise that so 
far we have done little but increase the burden 
of work and multiply the means of death. But 
for the hope of better things to come, our 
civilisation would not seem worth while. 

But this is a digression. Let us go back. 
The great majority of women have no means 
of support of their own. This Is true also of 
men. But the men can acquire means of sup- 
port. They can hire themselves out and work. 
Better still, by the Industrious process of in- 
trigue rightly called ^'busyness," or business, 
they may presently get hold of enough of other 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

people's things to live without working. Or 
again, men can, with a fair prospect of success, 
enter the criminal class, either in its lower ranks 
as a house breaker, or in Its upper ranks, 
through politics. Take It all In all a man has 
a certain chance to get along in life. 

A woman, on the other hand, has little or 
none. The world's work Is open to her, but 
she cannot do it. She lacks the physical 
strength for laying bricks or digging coal. If 
put to work on a steel beam a hundred feet 
above the ground, she would fall off. For the 
pursuit of business her head is all wrong. Fig- 
ures confuse her. She lacks sustained atten- 
tion and in point of morals the'average woman 
is, even for business, too crooked. 

This last point is one that will merit a lit- 
tle emphasis. Men are queer creatures. They 
are able to set up a code of rules or a standard, 
often quite an artificial one, and stick to It. 
They have acquired the art of playing the 
game. Eleven men can put on white flannel 
trousers and call themselves a cricket team, 
on which an entirely new set of obligations, 

142 



The Woman Question 



almost a new set of personalities, are wrapped 
about them. Women could never be a team 
of anything. 

So it is in business. Men are able to main- 
tain a sort of rough and ready code which pre- 
scribes the particular amount of cheating that 
a man may do under the rules. This is called 
business honesty, and many men adhere to it 
with a dog-like tenacity, growing old in it, till 
it is stamped on their grizzled faces, visibly. 
They can feel it inside them like a virtue. So 
much will they cheat and no more. Hence men 
are able to trust one another, knowing the ex- 
act degree of dishonesty they are entitled to 
expect. 

With women it is entirely different. They 
bring to business an unimpaired vision. They 
see it as it is. It would be impossible to trust 
them. They refuse to play fair. 

Thus it comes about that woman Is ex- 
cluded, to a great extent, from the world's work 
and the world's pay. 

There is nothing really open to her except 
one thing, — marriage. She must find a man 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

who will be willing, in return for her society, 
to give her half of everything he has, allow 
her the sole use of his house during the day- 
time, pay her taxes, and provide her clothes. 

This was, formerly and for many centuries, 
not such a bad solution of the question. The 
women did fairly well out of it. It was the 
habit to marry early and often. The "house 
and home'^ was an important place. The great 
majority of people, high and low, lived on the 
land. The work of the wife and the work of 
the husband ran closely together. The two 
were complementary and fitted into one an- 
other. A woman who had to superintend the 
baking of bread and the brewing of beer, the 
spinning of yarn and the weaving of clothes, 
could not complain that her life was incom- 
plete. 

Then came the modern age, beginning let 
us say about a hundred and fifty years ago. 
The distinguishing marks of it have been ma- 
chinery and the modern city. The age of in- 
vention swept the people off the land. It herd- 
ed them into factories, creating out of each man 

144 



The Woman Question 



a poor miserable atom divorced from heredi- 
tary ties, with no rights, no duties, and no place 
in the world except what his wages contract 
may confer on him. Every man for himself, 
and sink or swim, became the order of the day. 
It was nicknamed "industrial freedom." The 
world's production increased enormously. It 
is doubtful if the poor profited much. They 
obtained the modern city, — full of light and 
noise and excitement, lively with crime and gay 
with politics, — and the free school where they 
learned to read and write, by which means 
they might hold a mirror to their poverty and 
take a good look at it. They lost the quiet of 
the country side, the murmur of the brook and 
the inspiration of the open sky. These are un- 
conscious things, but the peasant who has been 
reared among them, for all his unconsciousness, 
pines and dies without them. It is doubtful if 
the poor have gained. The chaw-bacon rustic 
who trimmed a hedge in the reign of George 
the First, compares well with the pale slum-rat 
of the reign of George V. 

But if the machine age has profoundly al- 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

tered the position of the working man, it has 
done still more with woman. It has dispos- 
sessed her. Her work has been taken away. 
The machine does it. It makes the clothes 
and brews the beer. The roar of the vacuum 
cleaner has hushed the sound of the broom. 
The proud proportions of the old-time cook, 
are dwindled to the slim outline of the gas- 
stove expert operating on a beefsteak with the 
aid of a thermometer. And at the close of 
day the machine, wound with a little key, sings 
the modern infant to its sleep, with the fault- 
less lullaby of the Victrola. The home has 
passed, or at least is passing out of existence. 
In place of it is the "apartment" — an incom- 
plete thing, a mere part of something, where 
children are an intrusion, where hospitality is 
done through a caterer, and where Christmas 
is only the twenty-fifth of December. 

All this the machine age did for woman. 
For a time she suffered — the one thing she had 
learned, in the course of centuries, to do with 
admirable fitness. With each succeeding de- 
cade of the modern age things grew worse in- 

.146 



The Woman Question 



stead of better. The age for marriage shift- 
ed. A wife instead of being a help-mate had 
become a burden that must be carried. It was 
no longer true that two could live on less than 
one. The prudent youth waited till he could 
"afford" a wife. Love itself grew timid. Lit- 
tle Cupid exchanged his bow and arrow for 
a book on arithmetic and studied money sums. 
The school girl who flew to Gretna Green in 
a green and yellow cabriolet beside a peach- 
faced youth, — angrily pursued by an ancient 
father of thirty-eight, — all this drifted into the 
pictures of the past, romantic but quite impos- 
sible. 

Thus the unmarried woman, a quite distinct 
thing from the "old maid" of ancient times, 
came into existence, and multiplied and in- 
creased till there were millions of her. 

Then there rose up In our own time, or with- 
in call of It, a deliverer. It was the Awful 
Woman with the Spectacles, and the doctrine 
that she preached was Woman's Rights. She 
came as a new thing, a hatchet In her hand, 
breaking glass. But in reality she was no new 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

thing at all, and had her lineal descent in his- 
tory from age to age. The Romans knew 
her as a sybil and shuddered at her. The Mid- 
dle Ages called her a witch and burnt her. 
The ancient law of England named her a scold 
and ducked her in a pond. But the men of 
the modern age, living indoors and losing 
something of their ruder fibre, grew afraid of 
her. The Awful Woman, — meddlesome, vo- 
ciferous, intrusive, — came into her own. 

Her softer sisters followed her. She be- 
came the leader of her sex. ^'Things are all 
wrong,'' she screamed, 'Vith the status of 
women." Therein she was quite right. "The 
remedy for it all," she howled, "is to make 
women *free,' to give women the vote. When 
once women are 'free' everything will be all 
right." Therein the woman with the specta- 
cles was, and is, utterly wrong. 

The women's vote, when they get it, will 
leave women much as they were before. 

Let it be admitted quite frankly that women 
are going to get the vote. Within a very short 
time all over the British Isles and North Amer- 

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The Woman Question 



ica, — in the States and the nine provinces of 
Canada, — woman suffrage will soon be an ac- 
complished fact. It is a coming event which 
casts its shadow, or its illumination, in front of 
it. The woman's vote and total prohibition 
are two things that are moving across the map 
with gigantic strides. Whether they are good 
or bad things is another question. They are 
coming. As for the women's vote, it has large- 
ly come. And as for prohibition, it is going to 
be recorded as one of the results of the Euro- 
pean War, foreseen by nobody. When the 
King of England decided that the way in which 
he could best help the country was by giving 
up drinking, the admission was fatal. It will 
stand as one of the landmarks of British his- 
tory comparable only to such things as the 
signing of the Magna Carta by King John, or 
the serving out of rum and water instead of 
pure rum in the British Navy under George III. 
So the woman's vote and prohibition are 
coming. A few rare spots — such as Louisiana, 
and the City of New York — will remain and 
offer here and there a wet oasis in the desert 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

of dry virtue. Even that cannot endure. Be- 
fore many years are past, all over this con- 
tinent women with a vote and men without a 
drink will stand looking at one another and 
wondering, what next? 

For when the vote is reached the woman 
question will not be solved but only begun. In 
and of itself, a vote is nothing. It neither 
warms the skin nor fills the stomach. Very 
often the privilege of a vote confers nothing 
but the right to express one's opinion as to 
which of two crooks is the crookeder. 

But after the women have obtained the vote 
the question is, what are they going to do with 
it? The answer is, nothing, or at any rafe 
nothing that men would not do without them. 
Their only visible use of it will be to elect 
men into office. Fortunately for us all they 
will not elect women. Here and there per- 
haps at the outset, it will be done as the re- 
sult of a sort of spite, a kind of sex antag- 
onism bred by the controversy itself. But, 
speaking broadly, the women's vote will not be 
used to elect women to office. Women do not 

150 



The Woman Question 



think enough of one another to do that. If 
they want a lawyer they consult a man, and 
those who can afford it have their clothes' 
made by men, and their cooking done by a 
chef. As for their money, no woman would 
entrust that to another woman's keeping. They 
are far too wise for that. 

So the woman's vote will not result in 
the setting up of female prime ministers and 
of parliaments in which the occupants of the 
treasury bench cast languishing eyes across at 
the flushed faces of the opposition. From the 
utter ruin involved in such an attempt at mixed 
government, the women themselves will save 
us. They will elect men. They may even pick 
some good ones. It is a nice question and will 
stand thinking about. 

But what else, or what further can they do, 
by means of their vote and their representa- 
tives to ^'emancipate" and "liberate" their sex? 

Many feminists would tell us at once that 
if women had the vote they would, first and 
foremost, throw everything open to women on 
the same terms as men. Whole speeches are 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

made on this point, and a fine fury thrown 
into it, often very beautiful to behold. 

The entire idea Is a delusion. Practically 
all of the world's work is open to women now, 
wide open. The only trouble is that they can^t 
do it. There Is nothing to prevent a woman 
from managing a bank, or organising a com- 
pany, or running a department store, or float- 
ing a merger, or building a railway, — except 
the simple fact that she can't. Here and there 
an odd woman does such things, but she Is only 
the exception that proves the rule. Such women 
are merely — and here I am speaking In the 
most decorous biological sense, — "sports." 
The ordinary woman cannot do the ordinary 
man's work. She never has and never will. 
The reasons why she can't are so many, that 
is, she ^^can*t^* In so many different ways, that 
it Is not worth while to try to name them. 

Here and there It Is true there are things 
closed to women, not by their own Inability but 
by the law. This Is a gross injustice. There 
is -no defence for it. The province In which 
I live, for example, refuses to allow women to 

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The Woman Question 



practise as lawyers. This is wrong. Women 
have just as good a right to fail at being law- 
yers as they have at anything else. But even 
if all these legal disabilities, where they exist, 
were removed (as they will be under a woman's 
vote) the difference to women at large will be 
infinitesimal. A few gifted "sports" will earn 
a handsome livelihood, but the woman question 
in the larger sense will not move one inch 
nearer to solution. 

The feminists, in fact, are haunted by the 
idea that it is possible for the average woman 
to have a life patterned after that of the ordi- 
nary man. They imagine her as having a ca- 
reer, a profession, a vocation, — something 
which will be her "life work," — just as selling 
coal is the life work of the coal merchant. 

If this were so, the whole question would 
be solved. Women and men would become 
equal and independent. It is thus indeed that 
the feminist sees them, through the roseate 
mist created by imagination. Husband and 
wife appear as a couple of honourable part- 
ners who share a house together. Each is off 



Essays and Literary Studies 

to business In the morning. The husband Is, 
let us say, a stock broker: the wife manufac- 
tures Iron and steel. The wife Is a Liberal, 
the husband a Conservative. At their dinner 
they have animated discussions over the tariff 
till It Is time for them to go to their clubs. 

These two Impossible creatures haunt the 
brain of the feminist and disport them In the 
pages of the up-to-date novel. 

The whole thing is mere fiction. It Is quite 
Impossible for women, — the average and ordi- 
nary women, — ^to go In for having a career. 
Nature has forbidden It. The average woman 
must necessarily have, — I can only give the 
figures roughly, — about three and a quarter 
children. She must replace In the population 
herself and her husband 'with something over 
to allow for the people who never marry and 
for the children that do not reach maturity. 
If she fails to do this the population comes to 
an end. Any scheme of social life must allow 
for these three and a quarter children and 
for the years of care that must be devoted to 
them. The vacuum cleaner can take the place 

154 



The Woman Question 



of the housewife. It cannot replace the mother. 
No man ever said his prayers at the knees of 
a vacuum cleaner, or drew his first lessons in 
manliness and worth from the sweet old-fash- 
ioned stories that a vacuum cleaner told. Fem- 
inists of the enraged kind may talk as they 
will of the paid attendant and the expert baby- 
minder. Fiddlesticks ! These things are a 
mere supplement, useful enough but as far 
away from the realities of motherhood as the 
vacuum cleaner itself. But the point is one 
that need not be laboured. Sensible people un- 
derstand it as soon as said. With fools it is 
not worth while to argue. 

But, it may be urged, there are, even as it 
is, a great many women who are working. The 
wages that they receive are extremely low. 
They are lower in most cases than the wages 
for the same, or similar work, done by men. 
Cannot the woman's vote at least remedy this? 

Here is something that deserves thinking 
about and that is far more nearly within the 
.realm of what is actual and possible than wild 
talk of equalising and revolutionising the sexes. 

155 



Essays and Literary Studies 

It is quite true that women's work is un- 
derpaid. But this is only a part of a larger so- 
cial injustice. 

The case stands somewhat as follows: 
Women get low wages because low wages are 
all that they are worth. Taken by itself this 
is a brutal and misleading statement. What 
is meant is this. The rewards and punishments 
in the unequal and ill-adjusted world in which 
we live are most unfair. The price of anything, 
— sugar, potatoes, labour, or anything else, — 
varies according to the supply and demand: if 
many people want it and few can supply it 
the price goes up : if the contrary it goes down. 
If enough cabbages are brought to market they 
wilt not bring a cent a piece, no matter what 
it cost to raise them. 

On these terms each of us sells his labour. 
The lucky ones, with some rare gift, or trained 
capacity, or some ability that by mere circum- 
stance happens to be in a great demand, can 
sell high. If there were only one night plumber 
in a great city, and the water pipes in a dozen 
homes of a dozen millionaires should burst all 

156 



The Woman Question 



at once, he might charge a fee like that of a 
consulting lawyer. 

On the other hand the unlucky sellers whose 
numbers are greater than the demand, — the 
mass of common labourers, — get a mere pit- 
tance. To say that their wage represents all 
that they produce is to argue in a circle. It 
is the mere pious quietism with which the well- 
to-do man who is afraid to think boldly on so- 
cial questions drugs his conscience to sleep. 

So it stands with women's wages. It is the 
sheer numbers of the women themselves, crowd- 
ing after the few jobs that they can do, that 
brings them down. It has nothing to do with 
the attitude of men collectively towards women 
in the lump. It cannot be remedied by any 
form of woman's freedom. Its remedy is bound 
up with the general removal of social injus- 
tice, the general abolition of poverty, which is 
to prove the great question of the century be- 
fore us. The question of women's wages is a 
part of the wages' question. 

To my thinking the whole idea of making 
women free and equal (politically) with men 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

as a way of improving their status, starts from 
a wrong basis and proceeds in a wrong direc- 
tion. 

Women need not more freedom hut less. 
Social policy should proceed from the funda- 
mental truth that women are and must be de- 
pendent. If they cannot be looked after by an 
individual (a thing on which they took their 
chance in earlier days) they must be looked 
after by the State. To expect a woman, for 
example, if left by the death of her husband 
with young children without support, to main- 
tain herself by her own efforts, is the most ab- 
surd mockery of freedom ever devised. Ear- 
lier generations of mankind, for all that they 
lived in the jungle and wore cocoanut leaves, 
knew nothing of it. To turn a girl loose in 
the world to work for herself, when there is 
no work to be had, or none at a price that 
will support life, is a social crime. 

I am not attempting to show in what way 
the principle of woman's dependence should 
be worked out in detail in legislation. Noth- 
ing short of a book could deal with it. All 

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The Woman Question 



that the present essay attempts is the presen- 
tation of a point of view. 

I have noticed that my clerical friends, on 
the rare occasions when they are privileged to 
preach to me, have a way of closing their ser- 
mons by "leaving their congregations with a 
thought." It is a good scheme. It suggests 
an inexhaustible fund of reserve thought not yet 
tapped. It keeps the congregation, let us hope, 
in a state of trembling eagerness for the next 
instalment. 

With the readers of this essay I do the 
same. I leave them with the thought that per- 
haps in the modern age it is not the increased 
freedom of woman that is needed but the in- 
creased recognition of their dependence. Let 
the reader remain agonised over that till I 
write something else. 



159: 



THE LOT OF THE 
SCHOOLMASTER 



VI. — The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

TEACHERS," said the Minister of 
Education, swinging round in his 
chair, ''are very cheap just now." 
He looked at us fixedly. My col- 
league and I hung our heads. We realised that 
we had done a most impertinent thing in ask- 
ing for a rise in salary. We felt like a couple 
of dock labourers who had been asking the 
boss for an extra ?iVQ cents an hour — only less 
manly. We didn't exactly shuffle our boots and 
twirl our rough caps in our hands, while a 
tear did not, unbidden, course down our grimy 
cheeks. But we gave whatever symptoms of 
mute distress correspond to these things in peo- 
ple who have been expensively educated for 
ten years and have sunk all their available 
money in it. 

We hadn't understood properly about the 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

market for teachers. Somebody ought to have 
told us about it ten years before. 

*'Come, come," said the Minister of Educa- 
tion, for he was a kindly man at heart in spite 
of the rough duties of his office, "we can't give 
you a hundred and ten dollars a month just 
now. But what of that? You're young men 
yet. Keep right on. YouVe doing good work, 
both of you. You'll get it in time. Stick at 
it, my boys, and we'll see that you get your 
hundred and ten dollars, both of you, before 
you die.'* 

Very likely we should have. But neither of 
us remained as schoolmasters long enough to 
know. 

The incident happened more than twenty 
years ago and I can write of it now without 
bitterness; or at any rate with only the chas- 
tened regret of one who has spent the best 
years of his life doing task-work at a salary 
that began at fifty-eight dollars and thirty-three 
cents a month and after ten years of toil, ex- 
pired from exhaustion at a hundred dollars. 
That salary is dead and gone now and it is 

164 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

not for me to speak ill of It. I was glad enough 
to get it at the time. Each month I used to 
take it from the bank, look at it and then di- 
vide It up as fairly as possible, among those 
who were entitled to receive a share of it. 

But I am not here attempting to write a 
personal biography. I only mention these facts 
in order to show that on the present subject I 
am entitled to write with the authority of one 
who knows. 

Nor am I proposing in this essay to write 
on any such simple theme as that the salaries 
of schoolmasters ought to be raised. I don't 
think they should. I think that a great many 
of them ought to be lowered and that others 
ought to be taken away altogether. What I 
propose to show is that the whole position of 
the schoolmaster is on a wrong basis and should 
be altered from top to bottom. 

Let me explain at the outset that through- 
out this essay I am talking of what are called 
technically ''secondary" teachers — ^those who 
teach in high schools, collegiate institutes and 
the large private and endowed schools. I am 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

not undertaking any discussion of the status 
and outlook of the elementary teacher. He is 
in fact very generally a woman and perhaps 
deserves to be. At any rate he is not here in 
question. Still less, am I speaking of Univer- 
sity professors. I have dealt with them in an 
earlier chapter. They form a class by them- 
selves. There is nothing else in the world simi- 
lar to them. It is the secondary school teacher 
whom I am calling, for lack of a more exact 
term, the "schoolmaster." 

Now in my opinion (which is a very valu- 
able one) the whole status of the schoolmaster 
on this continent is wrong. His position is 
unsatisfactory. His salary is too low and 
should be raised. It is also too high and ought 
to be lowered. His place in the community 
should be dignified and elevated. He also 
ought to be given three months' notice and dis- 
missed. The work that the schoolmaster is 
doing is inestimable in its consequences. He is 
laying the foundation of the careers of the men 
who are to lead the next generation. He is 

i66 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

also knocking all the best stuff out of a great 
number of them. 

All of this is intended as a way of saying 
that, as at present organised or grown, the 
whole profession is chaotic. It is made up of 
young men and old men, good men and bad 
men, enthusiasts and time workers, martyrs 
and drones. They are in it, men of all types 
and ages. Here is a young man fresh out of 
college with clothes made by a city tailor and 
with hope still written upon his face; and be- 
side him in the next class room is a poor an- 
cient thing in a linen duster fumbling a piece 
of chalk in his hand, with the resigned pathos 
of intellectual failure stamped all over him. 

But there is a certain broad and general 
statement that may be made covering the lot 
of them. The pay of all the younger ones is 
far too high. The pay of all the older ones 
is far too low. Nearly all of them are teach- 
ers not because they want to be but because 
they can't help it. Very few of them — hardly 
any of them — understand their job or can do 
it properly. Most of them — in the opinion of 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

those who employ them — could be replaced 
without loss at a week's notice. None of them 
retire full of wealth and honour; but when they 
die, as most of them do, in harness, the school 
bell jangles out a harsh requiem over the de- 
parted teacher and the trustees fill his place at 
a five-minutes' meeting. Meanwhile the public 
voice and the public press is filled with the 
laudation of the captains of industry, of the 
kings of finance, of boy wizards who steal a 
fortune before they are twenty-five and of 
grand old men who carry it away grinning 
with them after death — to wherever grand old 
men go. These and such are shining marks 
from which the public approbation glints as 
from a heliograph from hill to hill. The poor 
teacher in his whole life earns no greater pub- 
licity than his obituary notice at twenty-five 
cents for one insertion. And one is enough. 

Now why should all this be ? Why is it that 
there are no such things as wizards of the 
blackboard, boy wonders of the classroom, 
and alchemists of the chalk stick? 

Let us look Into the matter. Consider just 

i68 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

who the teachers are and why they are 
teachers. 

First of all there is the small, the very small 
minority, who, with a full choice before them, 
went into teaching because they wanted to; 
because they thought it a noble, honourable 
work at which to spend a life-time — not to be 
used merely as a stepping-stone to something 
else; because through their love of the pro- 
fession they gave no thought to such draw- 
backs as the low pay, the slighted status of 
the teacher, the impossibility of marriage with 
a home equivalent to those of other men of 
equal industry and endowment — a home such 
as lawyers and doctors live in, such as kings 
of finance perpetually find too small for them, 
or such as those in which the senior clergy, 
in the pauses of their ghostly duties, take their 
lettered ease. To all of this the teacher — 
the enthusiast of whom I speak — has said good- 
bye at the threshold of his profession. He 
knew that he could never hope, as a success- 
ful schoolmaster, to dress as well as a success- 
ful lumberman or dog fancier, or join a club 

169 



Essays and Literary Studies 

like a banker or play golf and drink whiskey 
and soda as a broker does. Yet some few 
men here and there make this deliberate choice. 
All honour to them for It — or at least all hon- 
our that Ink and print can give them. They 
will get no other. 

A few such men, and only a few, have I 
known. ''Why did you go Into teaching?" I 
asked long ago of one of my colleagues. ''Be- 
cause I think it a fine thing," he said. At the 
time I thought him an abandoned liar. Later 
I realised that he spoke the truth. It took 
some ^VQ years of experience of things as they 
are to crush the enthusiasm out of him. He 
left the profession without illusions and with- 
out regret. His place was filled by the trustees 
without a pang: teachers were cheap that year. 

The truth is that, as things now are, it is 
not possible, or hardly possible, for a man to 
go Into teaching for the love of it and at a 
conscious sacrifice, and to stay In it for the 
rest of his working life. It can't be done. Hu- 
man nature Is too weak. To make such a thing 
possible there would have to be no salary at 

170 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

all and the position marked out for the eyes of 
the multitude as one of conscious martyrdom. 
If a mathematical master at a collegiate insti- 
tute were allowed to wear a long brown gown, 
with sandals and bare feet; if instead of being 
called Mr. Podge, he were called Father Aloy- 
sius or Brother Ambrose ; if instead of feeding 
at a three-dollar boarding-house, he carried a 
bowl at his girdle into which people of their 
free will put lentils and peas and sweet herbs 
— then the job would be all right. Human na- 
ture is such that on those terms men would 
give forth a life of strenuous devotion, asking 
no higher honour. There would be plenty of 
applicants for the position of Father Aloysius. 
Indeed, I might take a shot at it myself. But 
the unrecognised half-sacrifice of the teacher- 
enthusiast is not good enough. 

Yet after all the enthusiasts of this sort are 
only a small minority. The same element en- 
ters, no doubt, in part into the cases of many 
other teachers — but only in part and not as 
the leading motive. The chief cause of most 
of the schoolmasters being so is because of 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

the peculiar ease of access to the job. It is like 
a fly-trap, or fish-net. All may walk in; few 
can get out. What happens is this. There are 
a great number of youths who begin life with 
the idea that the way to success lies through 
a college education. This proposition may or 
may not be true. It is very likely that the 
best chance of pecuniary success lies in going 
into a linoleum factory or a hardware store 
at fifteen and learning while there is yet time 
how many cents make a dollar. But at any 
rate a college education is the recognised and 
only gateway to the professions of law, medi- 
cine and engineering. These appear to offer 
the best chances of success and the most attrac- 
tive form of career. They are trees with plenty 
of branches at the top. The young birds fly 
straight towards them. 

But a college education is a costly thing. To 
make a college graduate you have to sink in 
him a thousand dollars in cash, and I know 
not how much in other things. Funds run low; 
the young man's savings or his parents' spare 
money is exhausted. He graduates, as it were, 

172 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

on the brink of bankruptcy. The tall trees 
look infinitely far and the flight to their 
branches long and perilous. But standing be- 
side them, close and easy of access, is a stubby 
tree, a meanly grown thing but carrying all its 
branches stuck out sideways and very low. This 
is the teaching profession and into it the crowd 
of young men, ^'shoo'd" over the precipice of 
graduation, are precipitated in a flock. 

Not one in twenty — no, not one in a hun- 
dred — of these young men means to stay "in 
teaching." The idea of the average beginner 
is that he will stay in it long enough to save 
enough money to get out of It. It is to serve 
as a stepping stone to law or medicine, or some- 
thing real. 

Let the reader imagine the effect on the pro- 
fession at the outset of this distorted point of 
view. Who would wish to be treated by a 
doctor who was saving up money to become 
a ship captain? Who would put money in a 
railroad if it were known that the president and 
the traflSc manager and the rest of them were 
merely doing their work to get enough money 

173 



Essays and Literary Studies 

to qualify to be opera singers? Is a judge sav- 
ing money to be a poet, or a lawyer waiting to 
run a hotel ? Never. But this bad element runs 
all through the teaching profession like a rot- 
ten streak in a board. The thing is used as 
a mere stepping stone. The young men, those 
who can and who are not caught, do struggle 
out of it. Just as they are beginning to know 
something about the job they leave it and a 
new set of young men who know nothing about 
it take their places. Meantime a lot of them 
— I should say, at a guess, fifty per cent, of 
them — get caught in it and can't get out. The 
net has closed. Perhaps the young man be- 
comes aware that one of the female teachers 
in the kindergarten department has eyes like 
a startled fawn and a soul like a running brook. 
The discovery is too much for him. By the 
time he recovers it is too late. He is a mar- 
ried teacher in a black lustre coat, saving money 
to put his eldest boy to college. 

Or another fate may overtake the young 
man. He becomes, to put it very simply, lazy. 
All men do after the age of about thirty; 

174 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

though the successful ones are able to hide It 
by a great hustle of mimic activity. For the 
man on the make there is a whole apparatus 
of secretaries and subordinates, clubs, rendez- 
vous, appointments, business trips to New York 
and so forth to cover up the fact that he has 
ceased to do any real work. Even from him- 
self he hides It. He creates the fiction that he 
Is working with his brain — an Inner and mys- 
tic process which no one can dispute. 

So the teacher, like all other men, gets lazy. 
It seems harder and harder to take the plunge, 
to face the loss of his salary, to re-enter a stu- 
dent's boarding-house and open a text book to 
start the study of law. Something, too, of the 
mock dignity of his teacher's office has got hold 
of him and eats Into the sillier side of his mind. 
He has learned to set examinations; he hates 
to have to pass them. In his class-room he 
rules; when he says, "Jones, stand up," then 
up Jones stands. It Is hard to give this up 
and to have a professor say to him, ''Mr. Smith, 
sit down." No, It can't be done. He means 
to give up teaching. He still talks of law or 

175 



Essays and, Literary Studies 

medicine, or hints that he may go west. But 
he will go nowhere till he goes underground. 

A great part of this trouble springs from the 
teacher^s salary. It is too high. There it is, 
a hundred dollars a month, let us say, dead 
certain — no doubt and no delay about it. A 
lawyer makes (on the average and apart from 
exceptional cases) a few hundred dollars in his 
first year: perhaps not that; a young doctor 
makes on the average, something more than 
nothing; he walks hospitals, wears a white linen 
coat and says that his chief interest is in pa- 
thology; but what he really wants is a practice 
and after waiting a few years he gets it. These, 
and their like, the young engineer, lead a strug- 
gling life, subsisting on little, lying much and 
hoping very greatly. Meantime, the bovine 
teacher in his stall is as well paid at twenty- 
three as he will be at forty. 

For there it is! The insane idea is abroad 
that a young teacher, a mere beginner, is as 
good or practically so as a man of experience. 
No difference is made ; or none that corresponds 
at all with the vast gulf that lies in every other 

176 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

profession between the tried and successful man 
and the youth who is only beginning. Com- 
pare the salary of a bank junior (you will need 
a slide rule to measure it) with that of a gen- 
eral manager of a bank. And do the share- 
holders object to the difference? Not for a 
moment; the dullest of them will explain you 
the reason of it in five minutes. And does 
the bank junior object to the general manager's 
high pay? Not for a minute; he means to 
have that job himself later on and he wants 
it to be as highly paid as possible : in fact that 
is why he is a bank junior just at present. 

Let us reflect for a moment on what quali- 
fications the real schoolmaster ought to have. 
First, he must possess the knowledge of the 
things he teaches in the school-room. This is 
a mere nothing. Any jackass can learn up 
enough algebra or geometry to teach it to a 
class of boys : in fact plenty of them do. But 
apart from the trivial qualification of knowing 
a few facts, the ideal schoolmaster has got to 
be the kind of man who can instinctively lead 
his fellow men (men are only grown-up boys, 

177 



Essays and Literary Studies 

and boys are only undamaged men) ; who can 
inspire them to do what he says, because they 
want to be like him, who can kindle and keep 
alight in a boy's heart a determination to make 
of himself something that counts, to build up 
in himself every ounce of bodily strength and 
mental power and moral worth for which he 
has the capacity. The ideal schoolmaster 
should be a man filled with the gospel of strenu- 
ous purpose. 

Theodore Roosevelt (though he would shoot 
me for saying so) ought to be a schoolmaster. 
So ought Lord Kitchener and the Grand Duke 
Nicholas. Indeed, there are any number of 
unclaimed schoolmasters masquerading in the 
world to-day as kings and captains merely be- 
cause the profession is not made such as to 
call them in. But even strenuousness itself, in- 
tensity of purpose, is not all. Strenuousness 
without the capacity to do things degenerates 
into mere vague desire of accomplishment, a 
vapid fulness of intention, which is a sort of 
mental equivalent for wind on the stomach. 
Such is the attitude of the man who is perpet- 

178 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

ually talking of the ''full life" and of "develop- 
ing himself," who goes out into the woods to 
draw deep breaths and falls asleep after lunch 
while waiting to begin his life work. Our 
Schoolmaster must be other than that. He 
must be the type of man superior not only 
to the boys he teaches, but superior to the 
parents who send their sons to him; able to 
have been, had he so wished it, a better banker 
than the average bank manager, a better rail- 
road man than the average one, with brains 
enough to give points to a lawyer and breadth 
enough to make even a doctor feel thin. This 
is the kind of man to be a schoolmaster. He 
is to be found perhaps in the ratio of one 
in ten thousand ordinary citizens. Things be- 
ing as they are with the trade, such a man is 
seldom if ever actually engaged as a school 
teacher. He is more probably a general, or a 
bishop, or the head of a great industry or the 
manager of an international trust or a four- 
ringed circus, or anything else that knows a 
good man when it sees him and is prepared to 
pay a price for him. There lies the point. To 

179 



Essays and Literary Studies 

get the man you must hand out the pay. And 
as the pay is not forthcoming all the men of 
merit either never enter the lists as schoolmas- 
ters, or abandon the job before they are twenty- 
five. 

To get and keep the right man It is necessary 
to pay him an Income that will enable him to 
live with the same comfort and dignity as 
others of his endowment. There is no need 
to pay him this at the start. No man with a 
future before him cares a rush about the Initial 
pay. But the thing must be there as a future, 
as a possibility, as something to work towards, 
so that from the first day of his work the man 
feels that his life Is sealed to his chosen pro- 
fession forever. 

I do not mean to argue for a moment that 
a mere Increase of salaries will at once trans- 
form the teaching profession. It cannot. Yoii 
cannot make an Incompetent man any better by 
merely raising his pay. The present situation 
cannot be remedied by such a simple process as 
that. Nine out of ten of the present teachers 
ought not to be schoolmasters at all. They 

1 80 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

might, at a pinch, get along tolerably well in 
the law, or on the bench, or as clergymen, but 
the idea of entrusting to them the supreme func- 
tion of training the rising generation is non- 
sense. 

I wish that I had time to organise a school, 
and that some good fairy would stand the ex- 
pense of it till it got started. I mean, of course, 
a real fairy like Carnegie or Rockefeller, not 
the imitation one of the picture books. I would 
undertake to show to the world what a real 
school could be and, more surprising still, what 
a harvest of profit could be made from it. For 
the buildings and apparatus I would care not 
a straw. I wouldn't mind if the gymnasium 
contained a patent vaulting horse and a pneu- 
matic chest exerciser or whether it just had 
wooden sides like a horse stable. These things 
don't matter at all. But I would engage, re- 
gardless of cost, the services of a set of men 
that would make every other school look like 
— well, look like what it is. I would select 
the senior masters with the same care and at the 
same salaries as if I were choosing presidents 

l8i 



Essays and Literary Studies 

of railway companies and managers of banks. 
Let me try to give the reader an idea of what 
the staff of a first-rate school would look like. 
The list would read something after this fash- 
ion: 

RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL FOR BOYS 

{Beautifully situated in the Ozark Mountains, 
or the Adirondacks, or the Laurentians, or any 
place fifty miles from a moving picture.) 

Headmaster Mr. Woodrow Wilson 

Treasurer and Bursar. . Pierpont Morgan, Esq. 

Instructor in French Mons. Poincare 

Russian Teacher Nich. Romanoff 

Military Instructor T. Roosevelt 

T^ ,. - rSir Tames Barrie 

^"g''^*^ JMr. R. Kipling 

Piano Ig. Paderewski 

Other Music Al Jolson 

j^ [Sir Wilfrid Laurier 

^ [ Miss Jane Addams 

Matron W. Jennings Bryan 

Chaplain The Rev. W. Sunday 

There ! That looks pretty complete. I have 
not filled in the customary office of janitor and 

182 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

messenger. I admit that I might fill that my- 
self. 

Readers who are unacquainted with the sub- 
ject may think that the above list contains an 
element of exaggeration. If so it is very slight. 
If the profession were what it ought to be these 
are the very men who would have been drawn 
into it. If the list sounds at all odd, it is only 
because we have reached a stage where it seems 
quite comic to make out a list of eminent and 
distinguished men and imagine them schoolmas- 
ters. The reader, if he did not appreciate it 
before, can easily estimate by his attitude 
towards this list, what he thinks of the status 
and importance of the school teacher. 

But behind this list are facts. All of the 
instructors above, or people of their class, could 
be engaged at salaries ranging from thirty to 
fifty thousand dollars a year. I am not quite 
sure of the Czar and Al Jolson. But we may 
let them pass. A school with a staff like this 
would easily draw a thousand pupils at a yearly 
fee of two thousand dollars a head. There is 
not the slightest doubt of it. That would give 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

an Income of two million dollars a year. The 
salaries of the junior teachers would cut but lit- 
tle figure. They would serve, and be glad to, 
on the same terms as young lawyers or doctors 
entering on their professional life. With such a 
staff the simplest of buildings would serve the 
purpose as well as marble colonnades and 
Greek porticos. School buildings, as things are, 
are chiefly used to cover up the schoolmaster. 
They are like the white waistcoat and three- 
inch collar of the feeble-minded man. 

"But," the reader may exclaim In his Igno- 
rance, "where are the parents to be found who 
will pay two thousand dollars a year In school 
fees?" Where? Why, my dear sir, you may 
find them anywhere and everywhere. You may 
see them In any up-to-date grill room eating as- 
paragus at a dollar a plate; in any of the 
clubs where they drink whiskey and soda at 
thirty-five cents; on Pullman cars where they 
have to ride in a drawing-room to save them 
from the horrors of an ordinary bed; In steam- 
ers where they need a private promenade deck 
de luxe to keep them untainted by common In- 

184 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

tercourse. Two thousand a year! It is not 
worth talking about. You may stretch a string 
across any fashionable thoroughfare in any 
prosperous city and in ten minutes catch enough 
parents of this kind to fill an asylum. True, 
they don't pay two thousand dollars now. But 
that is because nobody asks them for it. They 
have been accustomed to think of a school 
teacher as a sort of usher, about half-way up 
in dignity between a ticket clerk and a furnace 
man. But once let them be able to boast that 
their little Willie is taught music by a man who 
costs ten thousand dollars a year, and you will 
see them on the stampede. 

Nor is it only the parents who can afford it 
who will pay the high fees. There will be also 
the still larger class of those who can!t afford it. 
There will be no holding them back. In this 
imperfect world people really appreciate only 
the things that they can't afiford. That is what 
gives real pleasure. A motor car that is only 
half paid for, a Victrola that may be removed 
from the house at any moment, an encyclopedia 

i8s 



Essays and Literary Studies 

with payments reaching beyond the grave — 
these are the true luxuries of life. 

There is no doubt whatever as to how par- 
ents would act towards a two-thousand-dollar 
school. 

Here I am able to speak with real authority. 
I learned all about "parents" in my school- 
teaching days. Every man, according to his 
profession, is brought into contact with his fel- 
low beings in their different aspects. A car 
conductor sees men as "fares"; a gas company 
sees them as "consumers"; actors see them as 
"orchestra chairs"; barbers regard them as 
"shaves" and clergymen view them as "souls." 
The schoolmaster learns to know people as 
"parents" and in this aspect, I say it without 
hesitation, they are all more or less insane. 

The parentis absorbing interest in his lop- 
eared boy (exactly like all other lop-eared 
boys), his conception of the importance of that 
slab-sided child and the place he occupies in the 
solar system, can only spring from an unbal- 
anced mind. It is a useful delusion, I admit. 
Without it the world couldn't very well go on. 

I86 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

The parent who could see his boy as he really 
IS, would shake his head and say: "Willie is 
no good; I'll sell him." 

But they don't see it and they can't. How 
often have I sat with parents In my schoolmas- 
ter days, listening to their comments and in- 
structions about their boys and nodding with 
the gravity of a Chinese mandarin while as- 
senting to their suggestions about the boy's 
training. 

My w^ords, or at least my thoughts on such 
occasions, would have run something as fol- 
lows : "To be bathed twice and twice only each 
week: Excellent, very good. A third bath 
only if an exceptional rise in the temperature 
seems to permit it: Admirable. I'll rise early 
and look at the thermometer — Never to be 
exposed to the morning dew: Ah, no, most 
certainly not. I shall be careful to brush it off 
the grass before he wakes. And his brain, a 
quite exceptional brain, — I was sure It was — 
on no account to be overstlmulated or excited: 
Oh, assuredly not. And his clothes — true, true, 
a most Important point — and so these are only 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

his second best trousers that I see before me — 
most interesting — and I am to see that on Sun- 
day morning he puts on his best — precisely, 
otherwise the impression he makes on the con- 
gregation at church might be seriously dimin- 
ished. And as to discipline — quite so, an im- 
portant point — a boy that can be led but not 
driven^ — ^precisely — I'll lead him — with a 
hook!" 

Now, do you think that people in that frame 
of mind care what they spend? Not a particle. 

There! I think the theme has been suffi- 
ciently developed. There is no need to wear 
it threadbare. The extension of the argument 
is plain enough. If the big private schools are 
remodelled, the others — the government col- 
legiates and so on — follow suit, or follow as 
far as they can. The tax payer can never, of 
course, pay enough to make the free high school 
the equivalent of the two-thousand-dollar acad- 
emy. But he will (for his own sake, since the 
tax payer Is also a parent) be led on to pay 
more than he does, or at least to pay It to 
the men who deserve It. But I repeat I have 

i88 



The Lot of the Schoolmaster 

no wish to wear the argument too thin. No 
doubt, as many of my friends will assure me, 
most of the statements above are at best only 
half truths. But the half truth is to me a kind 
of mellow moonlight in which I love to dwell. 
One sees better in it. 



189 



FICTION AND REALITY 



VII, — Fiction and Reality 

A Study of the Art of Charles Dickens 

IT was in one of those literary circles into 
which I am sometimes permitted to en- 
ter, that the talk fell not long ago upon 
the art of Charles Dickens and his place 
in the world^s literature. 

"Dickens, of course," said a gentleman with 
a velvet jacket and long black hair, "is not 
really to be taken seriously/' 
"Is he not?" I said. 

"Oh, no. One can't really call him a novel- 
ist in the true sense. His characters after all 
are not characters but merely caricatures." The 
speaker put his hand up to his necktie and gave 
it a peculiar little hitch. I had seen him do 
it twenty times already that evening. 

"Every one of the characters in Dickens," 
he went on, "has some peculiar little tag, some- 
thing that he is always doing and that you know 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

him by" (here he hitched his necktie again) — 
"for example Traddles in David Copperfield 
is always trying to flatten his hair, What's-his- 
name in Bleak House is always taking snuff, 
some one else, Uriah Heep, is it not? is per- 
petually rubbing his hands together, and so on. 
Now in real life," continued the gentleman in 
the velvet jacket in a pitying tone — "people 
don't do these things," — (Here he hitched his 
necktie) "they simply don't do them, that's all." 

"Precisely," joined in another person who 
was standing near us, by occupation a profes- 
sor of literature and hence one who ought to 
know; "there's no complexity in the charac- 
ters, eh, what? Everything they say, so stilted, 
eh? Take their way of speaking, eh, what? 
Always using some little phrase, something you 
can tell them by, a sort of formula, eh, what?" 

"Do you think so?" I said musingly. I was 
counting the number of times the professor was 
saying "eh" and I noted that he was up to 
four. I knew by experience that he could easily 
run up a hundred in five minutes. 

"Take Mark Tapley," he went on, "you 

194 



Fiction and Reality 



know, — In Martin Chuzzlewit, eh? Dickens 
can't make him speak without having him say 
'jolly.' It seems like an obsession, eh? Don't 
you think so, eh, what?" 

Some others joined us and the conversation 
became general. It appeared from it that Dick- 
ens was after all but a poor cheap comedian, 
a sort of black-faced vaudeville artist, a ven- 
triloquist with a box full of grotesque impos- 
sible dolls, each squawking out its little phrase 
amid the laughter of the uneducated. But as 
a writer In the real sense, he was, It seemed, no- 
where. Put him beside, — I forget who — and 
he shrinks to a pigmy. Compare his work to, 
— somebody I have never heard of, — and It 
withers Into dead grass. Take a really great 
man, a big man like, — I can't remember the 
name; he writes, I understand, a quarter of 
a column every third week In The Saturday Sup- 
plement: to do more would exhaust his vein, — 
and where Is Dickens? Or take a man with 
the penetration of, — I can't recall whose pene- 
tration, — but again, where is Dickens? 

From hearing which, I went home sad. For 

195 



Essays and Literary Studies 

I have been reading Dickens now for thirty-two 
years, — ever since I first opened the pages of 
the Pickwick Papers and stepped into an en- 
chanted world of English lanes, and stage 
coaches, and gabled inns and London streets, 
where I walked arm in arm with Micawher and 
Thomas Pinch and that great company of im- 
mortals, more real than life itself. 

That evening after I had come home and 
sat down beside my fire, I fell to thinking what 
Dickens would have said, or what his charac- 
ters themselves would have thought of the ac- 
cusations to which I had been listening. If one 
could only get them together and put it to 
them, what would they think about it? 

So I sat before the fire, a volume of Dickens 
upon my knee, musing, till it grew late. 

And then 

• •••••• 

"If the company will now come to order," 
said Mr. Pickwick, rapping gently on the ta- 
ble and beaming through his spectacles with 
a kindliness that seemed to irradiate the whole 
of the assemblage before him, "I will ask my 

196 



Fiction and Reality 



good friend Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz to read the 
indictment In the matter before us.'' 

There was an almost instant silence. Every- 
body present from sagacious persons such as 
Mr. Perker of Gray's Inn, or his unfathom- 
able colleague Mr. Tulklnghorn, to such sim- 
ple souls as Mr. Willett Senior, or Mr. Dick, 
could not fail to perceive that there must be 
something quite unusual on foot when Mr. 
Pickwick should speak of the learned Sergeant 
as his good .friend, and should even appear to 
direct a glance of something like affectionate 
recognition towards Mr. Dodson and Fogg 
who were seated In close proximity to the great 
legal luminary himself. 

"Half a minute, Pickwick," — interrupted the 
cheery voice of a rather dilapidated but al- 
together brisk personage seated in one of the 
front rows of chairs, *'dry business — lawyer's 
speech — go on talking — won't stop — perish of 
thirst — better let some one brew us punch — 
eh, sir — only a minute." 

"Egad, Pickwick, Jingle's right," cried out 
Mr. Wardle, "let the lawyers talk away If you 

197 



Essays and Literary Studies 

like, but I'll be dashed, sir, if Til sit here all 
evening with a dry throat listening to their 
palaver. Here, Emily, Joe, — where the dooce 
is that boy gone to '* 

But long before the fat boy could be roused 
up from his slumbers in a remote corner of 
the hall where he lay enthroned upon a pile of 
rugs and wraps, among which the greatcoat of 
Mr. Weller Senior, and the shawl of Mrs. 
Gamp were plainly discernible, — another volun- 
teer had stepped into the breach. 

How and whence Mr. Micawber was sud- 
denly able to produce a bag of lemons, by what 
necromancy sugar was added to them (set into 
such fascinating little lumps that the soul of 
the sugar trust might well shrink with envy at 
the sight of them) , by what artifice he was able 
to combine them in proportions known only 
to himself with a square bottle of extra gin, 
and to bedew the surface of the steaming mix- 
ture with nutmegs that must have come from 
the very groves of Lebanon itself, — how all 
this was done, I say, passes the imagination to 
conceive. Necromancy it must have been in- 

198 



Fiction and Reality 



deed. For as the steaming bowl of punch sent 
Its vapours throughout the room, so transfig- 
ured and yet so strangely life-like did the as- 
sembled company become as seen through Its 
haze, that I vow It must have been brewed 
from the very lemons of reminiscence, mixed 
by that strange alchemy of affection that Is 
wafted to us still from the pages of The Un- 
forgotten Master. 

• • • • « • • 

^'Excellent," said Mr. Pickwick, as he put 
down his glass, "I don't know when Fve tasted 
better punch." 

*'Only once, perhaps," chuckled Mr. Wardle. 

"Ah, well, yes, once, perhaps!" assented Mr. 
Pickwick with perfect serenity. And then turn- 
ing to old Mrs. Wardle, who sat close on his 
left hand, attired In her very best cap, and 
who for this evening seemed to have laid aside 
every trace of deafness, he added — "Your son 
will have his joke, madam: he Is reminding 
me of an ^cldent to which I fear perhaps al- 
ready too much attention has been given by — : 

by " 

199 



Essays and Literary Studies 

Mr. Pickwick seemed to hesitate for a 
phrase. He looked in a somewhat dubious 
way towards Mr. Perker of Gray's Inn, and 
added : 

" — ^by an undiscerning public." 

"Quite so," nodded Mr. Perker lustily, — "by 
an undiscerning public. You may say that, Mr. 
Pickwick, with entire impunity. An undiscern- 
ing public. I take your meaning. Very good, 
sir; a glass of punch, sir?" 

"With pleasure," said Mr. Pickwick. 
Whereupon there was such a hobnobbing of 
glasses and such an exchange of compliments, 
and such an affectionate reciprocity of senti- 
ment in various parts of the hall that it seemed 
for a time as if the serious business of the even- 
ing were likely to be indefinitely suspended. 

All good things, however, even the drinking 
of punch by Mr. Micawber and his associates, 
must of necessity come to an end. Partly by 
sundry mild knockings on Mr. Pickwick's table 
and partly by more violent disturbances on the 
floor created by Mr. Bumble's staff a measure 
of quiet was restored. 

20Q 



Fiction and Reality 



''With your permission, then," said the Illus- 
trious chairman, "I will resume the course of 
my remarks. My intention had been to con- 
tent myself with asking my good friend Mr. 
Sergeant Buzfuz to state the whole of the mat- 
ter which brings us together. But perhaps I 
shall not be trespassing upon my valued friend's 
prerogative if I say a word or two in intro- 
duction of his discourse." 

Loud cries of "Hear! hear!" mingled per- 
haps with a sound not entirely unlike the crow- 
ing of a cock and which may have proceeded 
from the lungs of Mr. Samuel Weller, indi- 
cated an ample assent. 

"Very good," said Mr. Pickwick, evidently 
very much gratified. "I shall try to be very 
brief and, as I dare not pretend to emulate 
the talent of my learned friend, I will en- 
deavour to say what I mean in as few words 
as possible." 

Mr. Pickwick paused for a moment, and then 
with a look of something like constraint or even 
distress upon his usually unruffled countenance, 
he resumed : 

201 



Essays and Literary Studies 

''None of you, I fear, are altogether igno- 
rant of the name of Mr. Blotton of Aldgate.'* 

Loud groans, coupled with cries of ''Shame 1 
Traitor! Snake in the grass!" gave ample evi- 
dence to Mr. Pickwick (had he needed it) of 
the reputation which Mr. Blotton of Aldgate 
enjoyed among his associates. Indeed it had 
so long been the practice to exclude that gen- 
tleman and all mention of him from every as- 
semblage of this sort that the company were 
filled with wonder that Mr. Pickwick himself 
should thus openly name his arch enemy and 
detractor. 

"It is only with great reluctance," continued 
the good gentleman, "that I pronounce the 
name of this individual. His offence towards 
myself I readily pass over: but his want of re- 
spect towards that illustrious body which was 
good enough to honour me by designating it- 
self after my name (I refer, more explicitly, 
to the Pickwick Club) is a matter which has, 
I think, already been condemned by the ver- 
dict of impartial history." 

Mr. Pickwick looked about him. His audi- 

202 



Fiction and Reality 



ence evidently impressed by the fervour of the 
chairman's eloquence were now completely si- 
lent. Some of them indeed, as Mr. Weller 
Senior, were evidently so spellbound by Mr. 
Pickwick's oratory that they leaned back in 
their seats with their eyes closed as in an ec- 
stacy of enjoyment. 

"Had Mr. Blotton of Aldgate confined his 
malice to his disruption of the Pickwick Club, 
or even to the foul blow which he dealt to the 
noble science of Archaeology in his unwarranted 
attack on the authenticity of an inscription 
which I may say at least stands, in spite of his 
onslaughts, unique in the annals of literature, — 
had his malice stopped here, despicable though 
it was, I for one should have been content to 
consign his memory to the ignominy which it 
has so richly deserved. 

"But, gentlemen, it has not stopped here. It 
did not so stop. It has gone on. It is still with 
us." 

Here Mr. Pickwick made another pause so 
dramatic and impressive that even those of his 
associates who were not yet aware of the pur- 

203 



Essays and Literary Studies 

pose of the present gathering, realised that it 
was no ordinary communication that Mr. Pick- 
wick was about to impart. 

*'It is now/' continued Mr. Pickwick, "some 
eighty years since the individual to whom I 
allude first gave evidence of the singularly ma- 
licious composition of his individuality. It 
might have been hoped that it would long 
since have passed into oblivion. Alas, it was 
not to be. Like everything that was touched by 
that master hand of which we all, my assembled 
friends, are the common product, Mr. Blottoii 
of Aldgate has proved immortal. More than 
that, he appears, like every character created 
by our great originator, to have been multi- 
plied to infinity. I lament to say that in this 
later age every civilised country has its Aid- 
gate, and every Aldgate, I grieve to state, is dis- 
figured by its Blotton. 

"One might have thought that our dead mas- 
ter's memory would have been left unassailed. 
Alas ! every genius has its detractors. In every 
generous bosom a snake is warmed. And from 
this snake, from these snakes of whom I speak, 

204 



Fiction and Reality 



from this cohort of snakes," — here Mr. Pick- 
wick spoke with the greatest animation, while 
his spectacles glittered with a just indignation 
that was reflected upon the listening faces be- 
fore him, — "from these reptile Blottons of the 
Aldgates of all countries there has gone forth 
against our great originator, and hence, gen- 
tlemen, against each and every one of us, an 
accusation so foul, so despicable, that I know 
no other way to characterise it than to say that 
it could have only emanated from the mind of 
a Blotton of Aldgate. That accusation is " 

Here Mr. Pickwick paused and looked about 
him while the assembled company remained 
breathless upon the very verge of expectancy. 

"That accusation is," repeated Mr. Pick- 
wick, "that we are not real, that we are carica- 
tures, that not one of us, and I beg the company 
to mark my words, not a single one of us, ever 
existed, or ever could exist; in short, my 
friends, that we are mere monstrous exaggera- 
tions, each of us drawn in a crude and comic 
fashion from a few imaginary characteris- 
tics!!" 

205i 



Essays and Literary Studies 

The mingled roar of indignation and con- 
tempt that burst from the throats of the audi- 
tors gave evidence at once to the power of 
Mr. Pickwick's oratory, and to the unanimity 
of their contempt. The loud cries of "Shame 1 
Monstrous!" that broke from the lips of the 
indignant Wardle and the vociferous Boythorn, 
were not unmingled with the sound of the crow- 
ing of cocks and the popping of corks, which 
gave evidence of the lively feelings of Mr. 
Sam Weller, Alfred Jingle, Esqre., Mr. Tap- 
ley, and others of the lighter spirits of the com- 
pany, while the voice of Mr. Micawber was 
heard above the din in loud enquiry as to 
whether this was still a British country or 
whether his own immediate return to his adop- 
tive Australia was not necessitated by the la- 
mentable but evident degeneration of the Brit- 
ish Isles. 

Mr. Pickwick waited until a measure of quiet 
had been restored and then resumed: 

"Under the circumstances, gentlemen, you 
will not be surprised to learn that after con- 
sulting with my valued friend Mr. Sergeant 

206 



Fiction and Reality 



Buzfuz, we have decided to hold an enquiry, 
or inquisition, — my learned friend will pardon 
me if the term is misapplied." 

"A halibi, governor, make it a halibi," in- 
terrupted a deep warning voice, *'it's far safer. 
Halibi first and henquiry afterwards." 

"In any case," said Mr. Pickwick, 'Vhat I 
desire to do with your concurrence, is to place 
the whole case in the hands of our legal col- 
leagues here present and to request our learned 
and distinguished friend. Sergeant Buzfuz, to 
conduct it for us." 

Mr. Pickwick paused, turned with a courte- 
ous bow towards the long table at his right 
hand at which a serried phalanx of lawyers in 
full wigs and gowns were seated, and indicating 
with a wave of his hand the commanding figure 
of the illustrious Sergeant who sat at the head 
of the table, he resumed his seat. 

Could any reader of the works of the Great 
Master have been present on this momentous 
occasion, it would have warmed his heart to 
have looked upon the solid array of legal talent 
at the long table over which Sergeant Buzfuz 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

here presided. Nor could he, In the face of 
such an Imposing panel, have felt the faintest 
apprehension that the base allegations of Mr. 
Blotton of Aldgate and of the numerous and 
loathsome progeny which have sprung from 
him, would not be scattered to the four winds 
of heaven. 

Here sat in friendly colloquy with Buzfuz 
the equally illustrious Snubbins: beside them, 
among his piles of papers and his sacks of 
reference books, laboured the industrious Phun- 
key: near him the massive brow of the great 
Stryver, bound with a wet towel, was bent over 
a glass of still steaming punch as If seeking 
a final inspiration: the nimble Perker of Grey's 
Inn was side by side with the Inscrutable Tul- 
kinghorn of Lincoln's: here sat Wakefield, his 
wasted face Imprinted with the dumb pathos of 
his broken mind, clasping his daughter's hand 
for comfort: here even the ghastly Vholes and 
the unregenerate Heep and the obsequious 
Dodson and Fogg mingled their false plaudits 
with the approbation of the crowd: and here 
at the further end, with head back-tilted on the 

208 



Fiction and Reality 



chair, with eyes that sought the celling, and 
with pale lips that still murmured the threnody 
of the guillotine, the Immortal figure of Car- 
ton, lit with a softer light as of the dead among 
the hving. 

So sat they, the unreal lawyers of the unreal 
books of the Master, and as they sat betokened 
by their very presence a greater power of life 
and truth than life itself. 

• •••••• 

Sergeant Buzfuz rose. We wish it were 
within our power to present to our readers a 
full report of the magnificent oration deliv- 
ered by that learned man. The introduction 
alone in which the Sergeant, with the aid of 
books and documents, handed to him by Mr. 
Stryver, rapidly reviewed the history of litera- 
ture from Plato to Chesterton, was of such 
singular merit that Mr. Solomon Pell was 
heard to remark that not even his intimate 
friend the Lord Chancellor could have made a 
better presentation. They had before them, 
said the learned Sergeant, not merely a ques- 
tion of art, but a question of reaUty, and of 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

the relation between the two. Of the nature 
of reality he would not leave them long in 
doubt. Witnesses would be called (witnesses 
of unimpeachable character) who should es- 
tablish the nature of reality to an iota. Nor 
should they long remain in doubt as to the na- 
ture and meaning of art. He would, If need 
be, call to the witness box a gentleman of un- 
excelled antiquarian learning who should es- 
tablish to their satisfaction the fact of the ex- 
istence of art among the Romans (here all 
eyes were turned for a moment towards Dr. 
Bllmber) . He would, if it were necessary, 
further establish the point from the lips of 
the consort of that distinguished scholar who 
would testify that there were distinct traces of 
art even In the writings of Cicero. He would 
have the word itself examined, searched and 
Impounded by one of the greatest lexicograph- 
ers of the age (here the Sergeant bowed po- 
litely in the direction of Dr. Strong), — a lexi- 
cographer, he would add, whose labours had 
now long since overpassed the question of Art, 
and all other questions beginning with the no- 

2IO 



Fiction and Reality 



ble letter A and were now rapidly traversing 
the letter D. 

"But, gentlemen,'^ continued the Sergeant, 
and at this point we are able to reproduce his 
words verbatim, "we need here something more 
than mere definitions. It is ours to enquire 
how far ART, — which in this instance is repre- 
sented by FICTION, — is at one with reality: 
how far the picture of life presented must cor- 
respond lineament for lineament with the literal 
aspect of the thing itself. The accusation has 
been made in the affidavits of Mr. Blotton of 
Aldgate that the art of the Great Master is 
false: that it shows life and character not as 
they are but distorted into a series of carica- 
tures. The fatal word 'exaggeration' has been 
launched upon an unsuspecting world. Charles 
Dickens,'' — here the Sergeant for the first time 
and with an intense majesty of bearing and 
expression, uttered that noble name before the 
company, — "Charles Dickens exaggerates. 
That is the charge of which he stands accused. 
That is the foul calumny by which his fair name 
is rapidly being overcast. He has made each 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

of us here present represent and typify (so 
runs the allegation) merely a single charac- 
teristic, and that, too, distorted and magnified 
beyond its natural shape. I, myself, gentle- 
men, as presented in the laudable, though I 
admit somewhat too impartial pages of the 
Pickwick Papers, represent (so it is said) a 
mere abstraction of forensic eloquence (I be- 
lieve the word 'bombast' is used in the alle- 
gation before us) " 

The Sergeant paused for the fraction of a 
second, and something like an expression of 
doubt, of uncertainty was seen to rest upon his 
features. But it passed as rapidly as it had 
come and he resumed: 

*'My good friend, Mr. Pickwick, is mere 
benevolence, sheer insipid benevolence, nothing 
else " 

At this point, somewhat to the distraction 
of the speaker, the genial countenance of the 
chairman, from his spectacles to his double 
chin, was seen to beam with an expression of 
such utter and complete benevolence that the 

212 



Fiction and Reality 



Sergeant thought It well to leave that item of 
his argument Incomplete. 

''Our friend, William Sykes (he Is not in 
this gathering, but I understand that he Is at 
present engaged In crawling about the roof of 
this building), — our worthy colleague, Mr. 
Carker, our esteemed ally, Mr. Jonas Chuz- 
zlewlt, these are said to Impersonate sheer 
malice of disposition and nothing else — nay, 
even my good friend, Mr. Pecksniff, whom I be- 
lieve I see at the end of the hall warming 
his back at the fire In a manner I think familiar 
to all. Is said to stand for sheer hypocrisy and 
for no other conceivable characteristic." 

At this point Mr. Pecksniff, for he indeed 
it was, was seen to lift a deprecating hand 
and those who stood or sat nearest to him 
were able to hear him enjoin his daughter 
Mercy in an audible whisper that she should 
remind him that night to make explicit mention 
of all literary critics in his prayers. 

''Or to come down to mere particulars and 
Idlosyncracies," went on Sergeant Buzfuz, "it 
Is said that our good friend, Mr. Uriah Heep, 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

is always 'rubbing his hands.' '' ("I admit," 
said the Sergeant glancing with a slight frown 
at the lawyer's table where Uriah sat, "that he 
is doing so, — happens to be doing so, — at this 
particular moment.") "But the allegation runs 
that he is always and perpetually doing so be- 
yond the verge of human credence. It is simi- 
larly charged that Mr. Micawber is always 
and perpetually brewing punch (Mr. Micaw- 
ber's guilty hand was seen to retreat noiselessly 
from the punch bowl as the Sergeant's eye 
turned to him) , that he also is always waiting 
for something to turn up, that Mr. Mark Tap- 
ley is always 'jolly,' that my honoured friend 
Mr. Wardle owns and conducts a country 
house where it is always and perpetually Christ- 
mas, that Mr. Jingle only speaks in monosyl- 
lables and broken phrases and has never been 
known to make a sentence in his life " 

"Stop, there" — interrupted the voice of the 
dilapidated Alfred Jingle, "damn lie — sentence 
once — Fleet Street sentence — never forget — 
noble conduct — everlasting gratitude " 

"Tut, tut," interrupted the chairman, "I am. 

214 



Fiction and Reality 



sure there are lots of things that we all had 
better agree to forget." 

The Sergeant's unhappy Introduction of the 
word "sentence" seemed to occasion so peculiar 
a feeling of discomfort In a number of the au- 
ditors (the lively agitation of Mr. Heep, Mr'. 
MIcawber and others was especially noticeable) 
that the speaker with the Instinctive feeling of 
the orator realised that It was Impossible to 
resume his suspended period. 

"But, gentlemen," he continued, "the hour 
waxes already late. I will no longer expatiate 
upon the nature of the charge before us. I 
will proceed at once In Its rebuttal." 

Here the Sergeant consulted for a moment 
a list of names that was handed to him by Mr. 
Phunkey. 

"Call Sarah Gamp," he cried. 

There was a sudden stir in a distant part 
of the hall, as of a heavy body being set into 
motion, and to the evident satisfaction of 
everybody the familiar form of Mrs. Gamp, 
who had apparently resumed her shawl and 
her pattens, was seen to approach the table. 

215 



Essays and Literary Studies 

She presently brought up alongside it with as 
much majesty of movement as that of a full- 
rigged coal barge coming to anchor beside the 
Embankment. 

The Sergeant now turned to the lawyers' ta- 
ble and addressed one of the members of the 
panel whose rusted black attire, whose pale, in- 
deed ghastly, face and whose uncertain eyes and 
ambiguous expression left no doubt of his iden- 
tity. 

*'Mr. Vholes,'' he said, "I understand from 
the Chairman that it is the general desire of 
the assemblage that you should act, as it were, 
as the advocatus diaholi, in other words, should 
have the privilege of appearing for the prose- 
cution. You are at liberty to question the wit- 
ness.'' 

Mr. Vholes arose. Accustomed as he was 
to the more leisurely procedure and the con- 
genial delays of the Court of Chancery, he may 
well have felt somewhat ill at ease in the sum- 
mary methods of investigation here adopted by 
the Sergeant. But his courage was fortified by 
the presence of sundry volumes of literary criti- 

2l6 



Fiction and Reality 



cism that lay heaped before him, written in vari- 
ous languages, mostly other than English, oa 
which he relied to establish his case. 

"Your name," he said, "is Sarah Gamp?" 

"Widge I scorn to deny it," answered that 
lady. 

"Your profession, I understand, is that of a 
nurse." 

"Widge it is," said Mrs. Gamp, "and as I 
was saying only yesterday to Mrs. Harris, 
which I don't see here to-night owing to the 
fact of her being unable to come, and it being 
the third time, poor soul, in as many years " 

Mr. Pickwick coughed. 

"I must beg you, Mrs. Gamp," he said, "to 
realise that in the lapse of eighty years a cer- 
tain change in public taste has dictated — a — 
has prescribed certain forms of reticence " 

"Retigence!" said Mrs. Gamp, bridling, 
"don't talk to me of retigence as if I was a 
Betsy Prigg that couldn't be trusted within 
sight of a brandy bottle. Widge I abhor," she 
added, "except it might be for a chill and being 

overtired after sitting up with a demise " 

217 



Essays and Literary Studies 

"Very good, Mrs. Gamp," broke in Mr. 
Vholes, delighted to find his witness developing 
immediately and without guidance the very 
characteristics and no others which he wished 
to elucidate, — "now tell us, please, Mrs. Gamp, 
and remember that you are virtually under oath 
— Are you real?'* 

"Api I widge?" said Mrs. Gamp. 

"Are you real?" said the rusty lawyer. "Do 
you mean to tell this court, — this assembly, — 
that there ever have been or could be women 
like you; are you willing to assert that you 
are anything more than an abstraction? Have 
you ever, in the eighty years of retrospect laid 
open to us, ever really lived?" 

Mrs. Gamp might have answered. We say 
advisedly "might have," in the course of time, 
although to all intent and purpose she seemed 
suddenly to be rooted immovable, her mouth 
half open, her features fixed in a stare of min- 
gled surprise and contempt at her interlocutor. 
But her answer was not needed. For at this 
moment a very singular thing happened. 
Whether it was due to the necromancy of Mr. 

218 



Fiction and Reality 



Micawber's punch, or to the lateness of the 
hour, or to the growing absorption of the as- 
sembled auditors, we cannot say. But the truth 
is that as they sat gazing fixedly at the witness, 
a strange and wonderful phenomenon made it- 
self felt. The face and form of Mrs. Gamp 

were multiplied before their eyes into not one 
but a thousand forms. It was as if the bounds 
of space and time were pushed aside and the 
eye could see through the long vista of the 
years, and through the broad expanse of space 
from country to country, not one but a thou- 
sand, — a hundred thousand Gamps. Here 
were Gamps in London garrets tending dying 
fires beside the already dead, — Gamps moving 
to and fro in area kitchens, their mysterious 
pattens clicking on the stone floor — Gamps with 
monstrous umbrellas staggering in the rain, — 
Gamps tending market stalls in the London 
fogj — nay, it was as if Mr. Vholes' words had 
acted like a talisman to call forth a legion of 
Gamps to prove the existence of a single one. 
Nor were the Sarah Gamps confined to a sin- 
gle time or country: there were mid- Victorian 

219 



Essays and Literary Studies 

Gamps and Gamps of the closing century, Aus- 
tralian Gamps vigorously washing clothes be- 
neath the gum trees, Canadian Gamps scrub- 
bing stone steps regardless of the thermometer, 
French Gamps busily checking umbrellas in 
the theatres, American Gamps superintending 
ladies' withdrawing rooms in railroad stations, 
nay, I will swear it, — Gamps that in form and 
fashion were negro, negroid or mulatto, but 
still evidently and indisputably Sarah Gamp. 
Strangest of all, no two of the figures in the 
vision seemed quite alike: the red shawl might 
or might not be present, the brandy bottle might 
or might not be there, the clicking of the pat- 
tens might or might not be heard, — and yet in- 
disputably and undeniably each of the figures 
was the same illustrious undying, ever repeat- 
ing Sarah Gamp. 

Mr. Vholes, aghast at the vision that he had 
summoned, sank into his seat. 

"I think, Mrs. Gamp,'' said Mr. Pickwick, 
*'that we need not question you further. You, 
at least, exist." 



220 



Fiction and Reality 



Sergeant Buzfuz rose again to his feet. 

**Call Mr. Pecksniff," he said. 

That gentleman, who was carefully attired 
in his customary long black coat and Irreproach- 
able white tie and who had by this time warmed 
his back until It had attained to that comfort- 
able sensation demanded by his altruistic feel- 
ings, drew near to the lawyers' table. 

^'Perhaps, Mr. Fogg," continued the Ser- 
geant, "as our friend Mr. Vholes appears to be 
incapacitated for further effort, you will your- 
self be good enough to examine this witness." 

Mr. Fogg rose in his place, bowed to the 
Sergeant and the Chairman, and directed his 
attention to Mr. Pecksniff. 

"Your name, I believe," he said, "is Mr. 
Pecksniff." 

The latter gentleman bowed. 

"Will you kindly tell the assembled com- 
pany," went on Mr. Fogg, looking about him 
with a great assumption of sharpness, "what 
is the nature of your profession?" 

"I am," said Mr. Pecksniff, "in my humble 
capacity an architect." 

221 



Essays and Literary Studies 

"And will you please tell us/* pursued Mr. 
Fogg, "what principal buildings you have 
designed?" 

"Certainly," said Mr. Pecksniff with great 
urbanity, "none at all." 

"None at all!" repeated Mr. Fogg, sur- 
prised. 

"None at all," reiterated Mr. Pecksniff. "To 
be quite frank and candid," he continued, "as 
we are speaking here purely among friends and 
I presume under the seal of confidence, I may 
say that the buildings which I am supposed to 
have designed were all the work of other peo- 
ple." 

"Do you see any of them here?" queried 
the lawyer. 

"One or two," said Mr. Pecksniff unabashed. 
"I think I see my young friend Thomas Pinch, 
whose talent was for many years invaluable to 
me, and, I believe, Mr. Martin Chuzzlewit, 
whose design for a grammar school has always 
been considered one of my most successful in- 
spirations." 

222 



Fiction and Reality 



"In other words, sir/' said Mr. Fogg, with 
great seventy, ''you are an arrant hypocrite.'* 

"I am," said Mr. Pecksniff, with a bow. 

"And a fraud, sir." 

"At your service," said Mr. Pecksniff. 

"You pocket money that you never earned." 

"I do," assented Mr. Pecksniff. 

"And you cover It up with a cloak of religion 
and family affection?" 

"Precisely," said Mr. Pecksniff, smiling ur- 
banely and placing his hands beneath his coat 
tails with his familiar gesture of self-satisfac- 
tion, "that Is exactly my policy." 

"And do you mean, sir," said Mr. Fogg, 
swelling visibly with the importance of his in- 
quiry, "do you mean to tell this sensible, this 
sagacious company that in face of these facts, — 
of your carrying on business in this fashion, 
that you are a real person? Have you the as- 
surance, sir, to state in the face of this damning 
evidence, that there are real people such as you 
in actual business in actual life?" 

Mr. Fogg, to judge by the way in which he 
here drew himself up, apparently expected that 

223 



Essays and Literary Studies 

the result of his enquiry would be so to crush 
and annihilate both the witness and the auditors 
as to explode the very existence of Mr. Pecksniff 
into the thinnest nothingness of the most impos- 
sible fiction. If so, his expectation was doomed 
to disappointment. For he had no sooner pro- 
pounded his question as to whether real busi- 
ness by real people was carried on in this fash- 
ion than the entire audience broke into loud 
and uncontrolled laughter. It may have been 
that the seventy years that have elapsed since 
the first earthly incarnation of Mr. Pecksniff 
have accentuated the character of modern busi- 
ness. But certain it Is that the notion that the 
existence of Mr. Pecksniff and his methods was 
a thing unheard of in the present business world 
convulsed the assembly with spontaneous merri- 
ment. We will not say that the same strange 
phenomenon repeated itself as In the case of 
Mrs. Gamp. But it is undoubted that before 
the minds of the auditors there might well have 
arisen the vision of an unending, undying series 
of Pecksniffs, — English, American, and Conti- 
nental — Pecksniffs of the old world and Peck- 

224 



Fiction and Reality 



sniffs of the new — Pecksniffs In little white ties 
sitting at board meetings of corporations, Peck- 
sniffs In long black coats presiding at funerals, 
Pecksniffs interviewing delegations of work- 
ingmen and refusing with deep reluctance all 
suggestions of increases of wages, Pecksniffs 
presiding over colleges, Pecksniffs elected into 
senates, Pecksniffs In city councils — till from the 
very length and extension of the series it ap- 
peared as If Mr. Pecksniff expressed within him- 
self the whole spirit and essence of modern 
business and modern politics. Indeed it ap- 
peared not merely as If Mr. Pecksniff were ex- 
tremely real and actually existed, but as if there 
existed more of him than of any other human 
being. 

Small wonder then that when Mr. Fogg re- 
sumed his seat and Mr. Pecksniff complacently 
returned to his place in front of the fire, there 
was a general feeling that the reality of at least 
his character had been more than vindicated. 

We could only wish that the limits of space 
before us would allow of an extended descrip- 
tion of the examination of the succeeding wlt- 

225 



Essays and Literary Studies 

nesses. We could wish that we might convey 
to our readers some notion of the genial warmth 
with which Mr. Wardle met the accusation that 
his house at Dingley Dell was an impossible 
place such as could only have existed in the 
grossest and most exaggerated fiction: of how 
he took his oath, with perhaps unnecessary em- 
phasis, that it was just the kind of house that 
might be found by those who had the eyes to 
see it, especially at Christmas time, throughout 
the length and breadth of England : of how he 
met the accusation that it was always Christ- 
mas time at his house by the simple but con- 
vincing statement that it always was : of how he 
met the charge that his young medical friends, 
Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen, were 
not possible or actual people by offering to turn 
any two dozen distinguished modern doctors in- 
side out and find a Bob Sawyer and a Ben Allen 
coiled up in the composition of any one of them : 
and of how he presently retired triumphant 
from the witness stand amid the uproarious ap- 
plause of Mr. Weller, Mr. Tapley and even 
the excitable Mr. Sawyer himself. 

226 



Fiction and Reality 



Equally fain should we be to describe the 
examination of Mr. Weller Senior, and how he 
refused to be drawn into any generalisation as 
to whether actual London bus-drivers and hack- 
ney coachmen might be said to resemble him- 
self : or how his solicitor and friend, Mr. Pell 
(an intimate acquaintance of the Lord Chancel- 
lor), saved the day by producing no less than 
fifty sworn and authenticated photographs of 
London busmen and cabmen of the year of 
grace 191 6, every one of which was conceived 
in the very spirit and likeness of Mr. Tony 
Weller. Equally regrettable it is that we cannot 
linger to describe the triumphant exoneration of 
Mr. Micawber, of Mr. Wackford Squeers, of 
Captain Cuttle and others whose characters had 
been made the subject of unjust aspersions. In 
every case it was shown with the greatest ease 
that these gentlemen not only had actually lived 
but were still living, and that too in every hab- 
itable country of the Christian globe. Only one 
incident of a slightly discordant nature occurred 
to mar the symmetry of the occasion. At the 

very height of the general enthusiasm, a num- 

227 



Essays and Literary Studies 

ber of females, — conspicuous among whom 
were Mrs. Annie Strong, and Little Nell, — 
forced their way to the front and burst into such 
floods of tears that for the time being they 
threatened to wash away the entire assembly 
in the flood tide of their grief. Mrs. Strong, 
indeed, kneeling at the feet of each of the law- 
yers in turn and offering to make an ample 
atonement to each one of them for the errors 
of her past life, may be said to have pushed the 
bounds of reality to the breaking point. Indeed 
for a moment when the loud sobs of Ham 
Peggotty, John Perrybingle, and others of the 
men were conjoined with those of the women, 
it seemed as if the meeting might end in disas- 
ter. 

But at the critical moment the voice of Ser- 
geant Buzfuz, who declared that the evidence 
was now all complete and that under the rules 
of the court evidence given through tears could 
not be admitted, saved the situation. And 
when a moment later the Sergeant called upon 
Dr. Blimber to summarise the general conclu- 

228 



Fiction and Reality 



slons of the assembly, it was felt that a great 
cause had been saved. 

Of the final discourse of Dr. Blimber we fear 
that we can only give the briefest outline. 
Whether from the lateness of the hour or from 
the majestic roll of the Doctor's periods, our 
eyes were closed in such an exquisite apprecia- 
tion of his eloquence, that the details of it es- 
caped our apprehension. But we understood 
him to say that the truth was that from the 
time of the Romans onward Art had of neces- 
sity proceeded by the method of selected par- 
ticulars and conspicuous qualities : that this was 
the riature and meaning of art itself: that exag- 
geration (meaning the heightening of the colour 
to be conveyed) was the very life of it: that 
herein lay the difference between the photo- 
graph (we believe the Doctor said the daguerre- 
otype) and the portrait: that by this means 
and by this means alone could the real truth, — 
the reality greater than life be conveyed. 

All of this and more we truly believe the 
Doctor to have said. 

But as he continued speaking his voice to 

229 



Essays and Literary Studies 

our ears seemed to grow fainter and fainter, 
the pictured company around grew dim before 
the eye, a gentle haze gradually enshrouded the 
benevolent face of Mr. Pickwick as he sat with 
closed eyes and head sunk forward, intent upon 
the Doctor's every word — fainter to the ear and 
dimmer to the eye — until somehow, as with the 
soft vanishing of a cherished vision, the picture 
drifted from our sight — and we sat alone 
awake beside the smouldering fire, the open 
book of the Great Master across our knee, mus- 
ing over the profundity of its God-given mes- 
sage. 



230 



THE AMAZING GENIUS 
OF O. HENRY 



VIII . — The Amazing' Genius of 
O. Henry 

TO British readers of this book the 
above heading may look like the title 
of a comic story of Irish life with 
the apostrophe gone wrong. It is, 
alas! only too likely that many, perhaps the 
majority, of British readers have never heard 
of O. Henry. It is quite possible also that they 
are not ashamed of themselves on that account. 
Such readers would, in truly British fashion, 
merely classify O. Henry as one of the people 
that "one has never heard of/' If there was 
any disparagement implied, it would be, as O. 
Henry himself would have remarked, "on him." 
And yet there have been sold in the United 
States, so it is claimed, one million copies of his 
books. 

The point is one which illustrates some of 
the difficulties which beset the circulation of 

233 



Essays and Literary Studies 

literature, though written in a common tongue, 
to and fro across the Atlantic. The British and 
the American public has each its own precon- 
ceived ideas about what it proposes to like. 
The British reader turns with distaste from 
anything which bears to him the taint of liter- 
ary vulgarity or cheapness; he instinctively 
loves anything which seems to have the stamp 
of scholarship and revels in a classical allusion 
even when he doesn't understand it. 

This state of mind has its qualities and its 
defects. Undoubtedly it makes for the preser- 
vation of a standard and a proper appreciation 
of the literature of the past. It helps to keep 
the fool in his place, imitating, like a watch- 
ful monkey, the admirations of better men. 
But on its defective side it sins against the light 
of intellectual honesty. 

The attitude of the American reading public 
is turned the other way. I am not speaking 
here of the small minority which reads Walter 
Pater in a soft leather cover,, listens to lectures 
on Bergsonian illusionism and prefers a drama 
league to a bridge club. I refer to the great 

234 



The Amazing Genius of O. Henry 

mass of the American people, such as live in 
frame dwellings in the country, or exist in city 
boarding-houses, ride in the subway, attend a 
ten-twenty- thirty vaudeville show in preference 
to an Ibsen drama, and read a one-cent news- 
paper because it is intellectually easier than a 
two. This Is the real public. It is not, of 
course, ignorant In the balder sense. A large 
part of it Is, technically, highly educated and 
absorbs the great mass of the fifty thousand col- 
lege degrees granted In America each year. 
But It has an Instinctive horror of "learning," 
such as a cat feels towards running water. It 
has Invented for Itself the ominous word "high- 
brow" as a sign of warning placed over things 
to be avoided. This word to the American 
mind conveys much the same "taboo" as haunts 
the tomb of a Polynesian warrior, or the sacred 
horror that enveloped in ancient days the dark 
pine grove of a Sylvan deity. 

For the ordinary American this word "high- 
brow" has been pieced together out of recollec- 
tions of a college professor in a black tail coat 
and straw hat destroying the peace of an Adl- 

235 



Essays and Literary Studies 

rondack boarding-house : out of the unforgotten 
dullness of a Chautauqua lecture course, or the 
expiring agonies of a Browning Society. To 
sueh a mind the word "highbrow" sweeps a 
wide and comprehensive area with the red flag 
of warning. It covers, for example, the whole 
of history, or, at least, the part of It antecedent 
to the two last presidential elections. All for- 
eign literature, and all references to It are "high- 
brow." Shakespeare, except as revived af 
twenty-five cents a seat with proper alterations 
in the text. Is "highbrow." The works of Mil- 
ton, the theory of evolution, and, in fact, all 
science other than Christian science, is "high- 
brow." A man may only read and discuss such 
things at his peril. If he does so, he falls forth- 
with Into the class of the Chautauqua lecturer 
and the vacation professor; he loses all claim 
to mingle In the main stream of life by taking 
a hand at ten-cent poker, or giving his views 
on the outcome of the 191 6 elections. 

All this, however, by way of preliminary dis- 
cussion suggested by the strange obscurity of O. 
Henry In Great Britain, and the wide and In- 

236 



The Amazing Genius of O, Henry 

creasing popularity of his books in America. 
O. Henry is, more than any author who ever 
wrote in the United States, an American writer. 
As such his work may well appear to a British 
reader strange and unusual, and, at a casual 
glance, not attractive. It looks at first sight 
as if written in American slang, as if it were 
the careless unrevised production of a journalist. 
But this is only the impression of an open page, 
or at best, a judgment formed by a reader who 
has had the ill-fortune to light upon the less 
valuable part of O. Henry's output. Let it 
be remembered that he wrote over two hundred 
stories. Even in Kentucky, where it is claimed 
that all whiskey is good whiskey, it Is admitted 
that some whiskey is not so good as the rest. 
So it m^y be allowed to the most infatuated 
admirer of O. Henry, to admit that some of 
his stories are not as good as the others. Yet 
even that admission would be reluctant. 

But let us recommence in more orthodox 
fashion. 

O. Henry, — as he signed himself, — was bom 
In 1867, most probably at Greensboro, North 

237 



Essays and Literary Studies 

Carolina. For the first thirty or thirty-five 
years of his life, few knew or cared where he 
was born, or whither he was going. Now that 
he has been dead Rvq years he shares already 
with Homer the honour of a disputed birth- 
place. 

His real name was William Sydney Porter. 
His nom de plume, O. Henry, — hopelessly tame 
and colourless from a literary point of view, — 
seems to have been adapted in a whimsical mo- 
ment, with no great thought as to its aptness. 
It is amazing that he should have selected so 
poor a pen name. Those who can remember 
their first shock of pleased surprise on hearing 
that Rudyard Kipling's name was really Rud- 
yard Kipling, will feel something like pain in 
learning that any writer could deliberately 
christen himself "O. Henry." 

The circumstance is all the more peculiar In- 
asmuch as O. Henry's works abound In Ingeni- 
ous nomenclature. The names that he claps 
on his Central American adventurers are things 
of joy to the artistic eye, — General Perrico 
Ximenes Villablanca Falcon ! Ramon Angel de 

238 



The Amazing Genius of O. Henry 

las Cruzes y MIraflores, president of the repub- 
lic of Anchuria ! Don Senor el Coronel Encar- 
nacion Rios! The very spirit of romance and 
revolution breathes through them ! Or what 
more beautiful for a Nevada town than Topaz 
City? What name more appropriate for a 
commuter's suburb than Floralhurst? And 
these are only examples among thousands. In 
all the two hundred stories that O. Henry 
wrote, there is hardly a single name that Is 
inappropriate or without a proper literary sug- 
gestiveness, except the name that he signed to 
them. 

• •••••• 

While still a boy, O. Henry (there is no use 
in calling him anything else) went to Texas, 
where he worked for three years on a ranch. 
He drifted into the city of Houston and got 
employment on a newspaper. A year later he 
bought a newspaper of his own in Austin, Texas, 
for the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars. 
He rechristened it The Rolling Stone, wrote it, 
and even illustrated it, himself. But the paper 
was too well named. Its editor himself rolled 

239 



Essays and Literary Studies 

away from it, and from the shores of Texas 
the wandering restlessness that was character- 
istic of him wafted him down the great gulf to 
the enchanted land of Central America. Here 
he "knocked around," as he himself has put it, 
"mostly among refugees and consuls." Here 
too was laid the foundation of much of his most 
characteristic work, — his Cabbages and Kings, 
and such stories as Phcehe and The Fourth in 
Salvador. 

• •*•••• 

Latin America fascinated O. Henry. The 
languor of the tropics ; the sunlit seas with their 
open bays and broad sanded beaches, with green 
palms nodding on the slopes above, — white- 
painted steamers lazily at anchor, — quaint Span- 
ish towns, with adobe houses and wide squares, 
sunk in their noon-day sleep, — beautiful Senori- 
tas drowsing away the afternoon in hammocks ; 
the tinkling of the mule bells on the mountain 
track above the town, — the cries of unknown 
birds issuing from the dense green of the un- 
broken jungle — and at night in the soft dark- 
ness, the low murmur of the guitar, soft thrum- 

240 



The Amazing Genius of O, Henry 

ming with the voice of love — these are the 
sights and sounds of O. Henry's Central Amer- 
ica. Here live and move his tattered revolu- 
tionists, his gaudy generals of the mimic army 
of the existing republic; hither ply his white- 
painted steamers of the fruit trade; here the 
American consul, with a shadowed past and 
$600 a year, drinks away the remembrance of 
his northern energy and his college education in 
the land of forgetfulness. Hither the abscond- 
ing banker from the States is dropped from the 
passing steamer, clutching tight in his shaking 
hand his valise of stolen dollars; him the dis- 
guised detective, lounging beside the little drink- 
ing shop, watches with a furtive eye. And here 
in this land of enchantment the broken lives, 
the wasted hopes, the ambition that was never 
reached, the frailty that was never conquered, 
are somehow pieced together and illuminated 
into what they might have been, — and even the 
reckless crime and the open sin, viewed in the 
softened haze of such an atmosphere, are half 
forgiven. 

Whether this is the ''real Central America" 

241 



Essays and Literary Studies 

or not, is of no consequence. It probably Is 
not. The "real Central America" may best 
be left to the up-to-date specialist, the energetic 
newspaper expert, or the travelling lady cor- 
respondent, — to all such persons, in fact, as are 
capable of writing Six Weeks in Nicaragua, 
or Costa Rica As I Saw It. Most likely the 
Central America of O. Henry is as gloriously 
unreal as the London of Charles Dickens, or 
the Salem of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or any 
other beautiful picture of the higher truth of 
life that can be shattered Into splinters in the 
distorting prism of cold fact. 

From Central America O. Henry rolled, 
drifted or floated, — there was no method in his 
life, — back to Texas again. Here he worked 
for two weeks in a drug store. This brief ex- 
perience supplied him all the rest of his life 
with local colour and technical material for his 
stories. So well has he used it that the obsti- 
nate legend still runs that O. Henry was a drug- 
gist. A strict examination of his work would 
show that he knew the names of about seventeen 
drugs and was able to describe the roUIng of 

242 



The Amazing Genius of O, Henry 

pills with the life-like accuraq^ of one who has 
rolled them. But it was characteristic of his 
instinct for literary values that even on this 
slender basis O. Henry was able to make his 
characters *'take down from shelves" such mys- 
terious things as Sod, et Pot, Tart., or discuss 
whether magnesia carbonate or pulverised glyc- 
erine is the best excipient, and in moments of 
high tragedy poison themselves with "tincture 
of aconite.'^ 

Whether these terms are correctly used or 
not I do not know. Nor can I conceive that it 
matters. O. Henry was a literary artist first, 
last and always. It was the effect and the feel- 
ing that he wanted. For technical accuracy he 
cared not one whit. There is a certain kind 
of author who thinks to make literature by in- 
troducing, let us say, a plumber using seven 
different kinds of tap-washers with seven dif- 
ferent names; and there is a certain type of 
reader who is thereby conscious of seven differ- 
ent kinds of ignorance, and is fascinated forth- 
with. From pedantry of this sort O. Henry is 
entirely free. Even literal accuracy is nothing 

243 



Essays and Literary Studies 

to him so long as he gets his effect. Thus he 
commences one of his stones with the brazen 
statement: "In Texas you may journey for a 
thousand miles in a straight line." You can't, 
of course; and O. Henry knew it. It is only 
his way of saying that Texas is a very big place. 
So with his tincture of aconite. It may be 
poisonous or it may be not. But it sounds poi- 
sonous and that is enough for O. Henry. This 
is true art. 

• •••••• 

After his brief drug-store experience O. 
Henry moved to New Orleans. Even in his 
Texan and Central American days he seems to 
have scribbled stories. In New Orleans he 
set to work deliberately as a writer. Much of 
his best work was poured forth with the prod- 
igality of genius into the columns of the daily 
press without thought of fame. The money 
that he received, so it is said, was but a pittance. 
Stories that would sell to-day, — were O. Henry 
alive and writing them now, — for a thousand 
dollars, went for next to nothing. Throughout 
his life money meant little or nothing to him. 

244 



The Amazing Genius of O. Henry 

If he had it, he spent it, loaned it or gave it 
away. When he had it not he bargained with 
an editor for the payment in advance of a story 
which he meant to write, and of which he ex- 
hibited the title or a few sentences as a sample, 
and which he wrote, faithfully enough, "when 
he got round to it." The story runs of how 
one night a beggar on the street asked O. Henry 
for money. He drew forth a coin from his 
pocket in the darkness and handed it to the 
man. A few moments later the beggar looked 
at the coin under a street lamp and, being even 
such a beggar as O. Henry loved to write about, 
he came running back with the words, "Say, 
you made a mistake, this is a twenty-dollar gold 
piece." "I know it is," said O. Henry, "but 
it's all I have." 

The story may not be true. But at least it 
ought to be. 

From New Orleans O. Henry moved to New 
York and became, for the rest of his life, a 
unit among the "four million" dwellers in flats 
and apartment houses and sand-stone palaces 
who live within the roar of the elevated railway, 

245 



Essays and Literary Studies 

and from whom the pale light of the moon and 
the small effects of the planetary system are 
overwhelmed in the glare of the Great White 
Way. Here O. Henry's finest work was dojie, 
— inimitable, unsurpassable stories that make 
up the volumes entitled The Four Million, The 
Trimmed Lamp, and The Voice of the City. 

Marvellous indeed they are. Written off- 
hand with the bold carelessness of the pen that 
only genius dare use, but revealing behind them 
such a glowing of the imagination and such a 
depth of understanding of the human heart as 
only genius can make manifest. 

What O. Henry did for Central America 
he does again for New York. It is trans- 
formed by the magic of his imagination. He 
waves a wand over it and it becomes a city of 
mystery and romance. It is no longer the roar- 
ing, surging metropolis that we thought we 
knew, with its clattering elevated, its unending 
crowds, and on every side the repellent selfish- 
ness of the rich, the grim struggle of the poor, 
and the listless despair of the outcast. It has 
become, as O. Henry loves to call it, Bagdad 

246 



The Amazing Genius of O, Henry 

upon the Subway. The glare has gone. There 
is a soft light suffusing the city. Its corner 
drug-stores turn to enchanted bazaars. From 
the open doors of its restaurants and palm 
rooms, there issues such a melody of softened 
music that we feel we have but to cross the 
threshold and there is Bagdad waiting for us 
beyond. A transformed waiter hands us to a 
chair at a little table, — Arabian, I will swear 
it, — beside an enchanted rubber tree. There is 
red wine such as Omar Khayyam drank, here 
on Sixth Avenue. At the tables about us are a 
strange and interesting crew, — dervishes in the 
disguise of American business men, caliphs mas- 
querading as tourists, bedouins from Syria and 
fierce fantassins from the desert turned into 
western visitors from Texas, and among them 
—can we believe our eyes, — houris from the 
inner harems of Ispahan and Candahar, whom 
we mistook but yesterday for the ladies of a 
Shubert chorus ! As we pass out we pay our 
money to an enchanted cashier with golden 
hair, — sitting behind glass, — under the spell of 
some magician without a doubt, — and then tak- 

247 



Essays and Literary Studies 

ing O. Henry's hand we wander forth among 
the ever changing scenes of night adventure, 
the mingled tragedy and humour of The Four 
Million that his pen alone can depict. Now 
did ever Haroun al Raschid and his viziers, 
wandering at will in the narrow streets of their 
Arabian city, meet such varied adventure as 
lies before us, strolling hand in hand with O. 
Henry in the new Bagdad that he reveals. 

• •••••• 

But let us turn to the stories themselves. O. 
Henry wrote in all two hundred short stories 
of an average of about fifteen pages each. 
This was the form in which his literary activity 
shaped itself by Instinct. A novel he never 
wrote. A play he often meditated but never 
achieved. One of his books, — Cabbages and 
Kings, — can make a certain claim to be con- 
tinuous. But even this is rather a collection of 
little stories than a single piece of fiction. But 
it is an error of the grossest kind to say that 
O. Henry's work is not sustained. In reality 
his canvas is vast. His New York stories, like 
those of Central America or of the west, form 

248 



The Amazing Genius of O, Henry 

one great picture as gloriously comprehensive 
In Its scope as the lengthiest novels of a Dickens 
or the canvas of a Da Vinci. It Is only the 
method that Is different, not the result. 

It Is hard Indeed to Illustrate O. Henry's 
genius by the quotation of single phrases and 
sentences. The humour that Is In his work lies 
too deep for that. His Is not the comic wit that 
explodes the reader Into a huge guffaw of 
laughter and vanishes. His humour Is of that 
deep quality that smiles at life Itself and mingles 
our amusement with our tears. 

Still harder Is It to try to sh«w the amazing 
genius of O. Henry as a "plot maker/' as a 
designer of Incident. No one better than he 
can hold the reader In suspense. Nay, more 
than that, the reader scarcely knows that he is 
"suspended," until at the very close of the story 
O. Henry, so to speak, turns on the lights and 
the whole tale Is revealed as an entirety. But 
to do justice to a plot in a few paragraphs Is 
almost Impossible. Let the reader consider to 
what a few poor shreds even the best of our 
novels or plays Is reduced, when we try to set 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

forth the basis of It In the condensed phrase 
of a text-book of literature, or diminish It to 
the language of the ^'scenario" of a moving pic- 
ture. Let us take an example. 

We will transcribe our Immortal Hamlet as 
faithfully as we can into a few words with an 
eye to explain the plot and nothing else. It 
will run about as follows: 

"Hamlet's uncle kills his father and marries 
his mother, and Hamlet Is so disturbed about 
this that he either is mad or pretends to be 
mad. In this condition he drives his sweetheart 
insane and she drowns, or practically drowns, 
herself. Hamlet then kills his uncle's chief ad- 
viser behind an arras either In mistake for a 
rat, or not. Hamlet then gives poison to his 
uncle and his mother, stabs Laertes and kills 
himself. There is much discussion among the 
critics as to whether his actions justify us in 
calling him Insane." 

There! The example Is, perhaps, not alto- 
gether convincing. It does not seem somehow, 
faithful though it Is, to do Shakespeare justice. 
But let it at least illustrate the point under dls- 

250 



The Amazing Genius of O. Henr^y 

cusslon. The mere bones of a plot are noth- 
ing. We could scarcely form a judgment on 
female beauty by studying the skeletons of a 
museum of anatomy. 

But with this distinct understanding, let me 
try to present the outline of a typical O. Henry 
story. I select It from the volume entitled 
The Gentle Grafter^ a book that Is mainly con- 
cerned with the wiles of Jeff Peters and his 
partners and associates. Mr. Peters, who acts 
as the narrator of most of the stories, typifies 
the perennial fakir and Itinerant grafter of the 
Western States, — ready to turn his hand to 
anything from selling patent medicines under a 
naphtha lamp on the street corner of a west- 
ern town to peddling bargain Bibles from farm 
to farm, — anything In short that does not In- 
volve work and carries with It the peculiar ex- 
citement of trying to keep out of the State peni- 
tentiary. All the world loves a grafter, — at 
least a genial and Ingenious grafter, — a Robin 
Hood who plunders an abbot to feed a beggar, 
an Alfred Jingle, a Scapin, a Raffles, — or any 
of the multifarious characters of the world's llt- 

251 



Essays and Literary Studies 

erature who reveal the fact that much that is 
best in humanity may flourish even on the shad- 
owy side of technical iniquity. Of this glorious 
company is Mr. Jefferson Peters. But let us 
take him as he is revealed in Jef Peters as a 
Personal Magnet and let us allow him to in- 
troduce himself and his business. 

''I struck Fisher Hill," Mr. Peters relates, 
"in a buckskin suit, moccasins, long hair and a 
thirty-carat diamond ring that I got from an 
actor in Texarkana. I don't know what he ever 
did with the pocket-knife I swapped him for it. 

"I was Dr. Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian 
medicine man. I carried only one best bet just 
then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It 
was made of life-giving plants and herbs acci- 
dentally discovered by Ta-qua-la, the beautiful 
wife of the chief of the Choctaw Nation, while 
gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled 
dog for an annual corn dance. . . ." In the 
capacity of Dr. Waugh-hoo, Mr. Peters "struck 
Fisher Hill." He went to a druggist and got 
credit for half a gross of eight-ounce bottles 
and corks, and with the help of the running 

252 



The Amazing Genius of O, Henry 

water from the tap in the hotel room, he spent 
a long evening manufacturing Resurrection Bit- 
ters. The next evening the sales began. The 
bitters at fifty cents a bottle "started off like 
sweetbreads on toast at a vegetarian dinner.'* 
Then there intervenes a constable with a Ger- 
man silver badge. "Have you got a city li- 
cense?" he asks, and Mr. Peters' medicinal 
activity comes to a full stop. The threat of 
prosecution under the law for practising medi- 
cine without a license puts Mr. Peters for the 
moment out of business. 

He returns sadly to his hotel, pondering on 
his next move. Here by good fortune he meets 
a former acquaintance, a certain Andy Tucker, 
who has just finished a tour in the Southern 
States, working the Great Cupid Combination 
Package on the chivalrous and unsuspecting 
south. 

"Andy," says Jeff, in speaking of his friend's 
credentials, "was a good street man : and he was 
more than that — he respected his profession 
and was satisfied with 300 per cent, profit. He 
had plenty of offers to go into the illegitimate 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

drug and garden seed business, but he was never 
to be tempted off the straight path/' 

Andy and Jeff take counsel together in long 
debate on the porch of the hotel. 

And here, apparently, a piece of good luck 
came to Jeff's help. The very next morning a 
messenger brings word that the Mayor of the 
town is suddenly taken ill. The only doctor of 
the place is twenty miles away. Jeff Peters is 
summoned to the Mayor's bedside. . . . "This 
Mayor Banks," Jeff relates, "was in bed all but 
his whiskers and feet. He was making internal 
noises that would have had everybody in San 
Francisco hiking for the parks. A young man 
was standing by the bedside holding a cup of 
water. . . ." Mr. Peters, called to the pa- 
tient's side, is very cautious. He draws atten- 
tion to the fact that he is not a qualified practi- 
tioner, Is not "a regular disciple of S. Q. La- 
plus. 

The Mayor groans in pain. The young man 
at the bedside, introduced as Mr. Biddle, the 
Mayor's nephew, urges Mr. Peters, — or Doc- 

254 



The Amazing Genius of O. Henry 

tor Waugh-hoo, — in the name of common hu- 
manity to attempt a cure. 

Finally Jeff Peters promises to treat the 
Mayor by ''scientific demonstration." He pro- 
poses, he says, to make use of the "great doc- 
trine of psychic financiering — of the enlighten- 
ing school of long-distance subconscious treat- 
ment of fallacies and meningitis, — of that won- 
derful in-door sport known as personal magne- 
tism." But he warns the Mayor that the treat- 
ment is difficult. It uses up great quantities of 
soul strength. It comes high. It cannot be 
attempted under two hundred and fifty dollars. 

The Mayor groans. But he yields. The 
treatment begins. 

"You ain't sick," says Dr. Waugh-hoo, look- 
ing the patient right in the eye. "You ain't got 
any pain. The right lobe of your perihelion is 
subsided." 

The result is surprising. The Mayor's sys- 
tem seems to respond at once. "I do feel some 
better. Doc," he says, "darned if I don't." 

Mr. Peters assumes a triumphant air. He 

25Si 



Essays and Literary Studies 

promises to return next day for a second and 
final treatment. 

"I'll come back," he says to the young man, 
"at eleven. You may give him eight drops of 
turpentine and three pounds of steak. Good 
morning." 

Next day the final treatment is given. The 
Mayor Is completely restored. Two hundred 
and fifty dollars, all in cash, is handed to "Dr. 
Waugh-hoo." The young man asks for a receipt. 
It Is no sooner written out by Jeff Peters, than : 

" 'Now do your duty, oflicer,' says the 
Mayor, grinning much unlike a sick man. 

"Mr. BIddle lays his hand on my arm. 

" 'You're under arr?st, Dr. Waugh-hoo, alias 
Peters,' says he, 'for practising medicine with- 
out authority under the State law.' 
'Who are you?' I asks. 
'I'll tell you who he Is,' says Mr. Mayor, 
sitting up in bed. 'He's a detective employed 
by the State Medical Society. He's been fol- 
lowing you over five counties. He came to me 
yesterday and we fixed up this scheme to catch 
you. I guess you won't do any more doctoring 

256 



it <T'1 



The Amazing Genius of O, Henry 

around these parts, Mr. Fakir. What was It 
you said I had, Doc?' the Mayor laughs, 'com- 
pound — well, It wasn't softening of the brain, I 
guess, anyway.' " 

• •••••• 

Ingenious, Isn't It? One hadn't suspected it. 
But win the reader kindly note the conclusion 
of the story as It follows, handled with the 
lightning rapidity of a conjuring trick. 

" 'Come on, officer,' says I, dignified. 'I may 
as well make the best of it.' And then I turns 
to old Banks and rattles my chains. 

" 'Mr. Mayor,' says I, 'the time will come 
soon when you'll believe that personal magne- 
tism Is a success. And you'll be sure that it 
succeeded in this case, too.' 

"And I guess It did. 

"When we got nearly to the gate, I says: 
*We might meet somebody now, Andy. I 

reckon you better take 'em off, and ' Hey? 

Why, of course It was Andy Tucker. That 
was his scheme ; and that's how we got the cap- 
ital to go Into business together." 

257 



Essays and Literary Studies 

Now let us set beside this a story of a differ- 
ent type, The Furnished Room, which appears 
in the volume called The Four Million. It 
shows O. Henry at his best as a master of that 
supreme pathos that springs, with but little ad- 
ventitious aid of time or circumstance, from 
the fundamental things of life itself. In the 
sheer art of narration there is nothing done by 
Maupassant that surpasses The Furnished 
Room. The story runs, — so far as one dare 
attempt to reproduce it without quoting it all 
word for word, — after this fashion. 

The scene is laid in New York, in the lost 
district of the lower West Side, where the wan- 
dering feet of actors and one-week transients 
seek furnished rooms in dilapidated houses of 
fallen grandeur. 

One evening after dark a young man prowled 
among these crumbling red mansions, ring- 
ing their bells. At the twelfth he rested 
his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped 
the dust from his hatband and forehead. The 
bell sounded faint and far away in some remote 
hollow depths. . . . *'I have the third floor 

258 



The Amazing Genius of O. Henry 

back vacant since a week back," says the land- 
lady. . . . "It's a nice room. It ain't often va- 
cant. I had some most elegant people in it last 
summer — no trouble at all and paid in advance 
to the minute. The water's at the end of the 
hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three 
months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss 
B'retta Sprowls, you may have heard of her, — 
Oh, that was just the stage name — right there 
over the dresser is where the marriage certifi- 
cate hung, framed. The gas is here and you 
see there's plenty of closet room. It's a room 
every one likes. It never stays idle long " 

The young man takes the room, paying a 
week in advance. Then he asks: 

"A young girl — Miss Vashner — Miss Eloise 
Vashner — do you remember such a one among 
your lodgers? She would be singing on the 
stage most likely." 

The landlady shakes her head. They comes 
and goes, she tells him, she doesn't call that 
one to mind. 

It is the same answer that he has been receiv- 
ing, up and down, in the crumbling houses of 

259 



Essays and Literary Studies 

the lost district, through weeks and months of 
wandering. No, always no. Five months of 
ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable nega- 
tive. So much time spent by day in question- 
ing managers, agents, schools and choruses; by 
night among the audiences of theatres from all- 
star casts down to music halls so low that he 
dreaded to find what he most hoped for. . . . 
The young man, left in his sordid room of the 
third floor back, among its decayed furniture, 
its ragged brocade upholstery, sinks into a chair. 
The dead weight of despair is on him. . . . 
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room 
was filled with the strong, sweet odour of mi- 
gnonette — the flower that she had always loved, 
the perfume that she had always worn. It is 
as if her very presence was beside him in the 
empty room. He rises. He cries aloud, 
"What, dear?" as if she had called to him. 
She has been there in the room. He knows it. 
He feels it. Then eager, tremulous with hope, 
he searches the room, tears open the crazy chest 
of drawers, fumbles upon the shelves, for some 
sign of her. Nothing and still nothing, — a 

260 



The Amazing Genius of O. Henry 

crumpled playbill, a half-smoked cigar, the 
dreary and ignoble small records of many a 
peripatetic tenant, but of the woman that he 
seeks, nothing. Yet still that haunting perfume 
that seems to speak her presence at his very 
side. 

The young man dashes trembling from the 
room. Again he questions the landlady, — was 
there not, before him in the room, a young 
lady? Surely there must have been, — fair, of 
medium height, and with reddish gold hair? 
Surely there was? 

But the landlady, as if obdurate, shakes her 
head. ^*I can tell you again," she says, " 'twas 
Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B'retta 
Sprowls, it was, in the theatres, but Missis 
Mooney she was. The marriage certificate 
hung, framed, on a nail over " 

. . . The young man returns to his room. 
It is all over. His search is vain. The ebbing 
of his last hope has drained his faith. . . . For 
a time he sat staring at the yellow, singing gas- 
light. Then he rose. He walked to the bed 
and began to tear the sheets into strips. With 

261 



Essays and Literary Studies 

the blade of his knife he drove them tightly Into 
every crevice around windows and door. When 
all was snug and taut he turned out the light, 
turned the gas full on again and laid himself 
gratefully upon the bed. 

And now let the reader note the ending para- 
graphs of the story, so told that not one word 
of it must be altered or abridged from the form 
in which O. Henry framed it. 

• •••••• 

It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the 
can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with 
Mrs. Purdy (the landlady) in one of those sub- 
terranean retreats where housekeepers fore- 
gather and the worm dieth seldom. 

"I rented out my third floor, back, this even- 
ing,'' said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine circle of 
foam. "A young man took it. He went up 
to bed two hours ago." 

''Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am?" said 
Mrs. McCool, with intense admiration. "You 
do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that kind. 

262 



The Amazing Genius of O, Henry 

And did ye tell him, then?" she concluded in a 
husky whisper, laden with mystery. 

*'Rooms," said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest 
tones, ''are furnished for to rent. I did not 
tell him, Mrs. McCool." 

'"Tis right ye are, ma'am; 'tis by renting 
rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense 
for business, ma'am. There be many people 
will rayjict the rentin' of a room if they be tould 
a suicide has been after dyin' in the bed of it." 

"As you say, we has our living to be making," 
remarked Mrs. Purdy. 

"Yis, ma'am; 'tis true. 'Tis just one wake 
ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor, 
back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be 
killin' herself wid the gas — a swate little face 
she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am." 

''She'd a-been called handsome, as you say," 
said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but critical, "but for 
that mole she had a-growin' by her left eyebrow. 
Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool." 

Beyond these two stories, I do not care to go. 
But if the reader is not satisfied let him procure 

263 



Essays and Literary Studies 

for himself the story called A Municipal Report 
in the volume Strictly Business. After he has 
read it he will either pronounce O. Henry one 
of the greatest masters of modern fiction or 
else, — well, or else he is a jackass. Let us put 
it that way. 

• •••••• 

O. Henry lived some nine years in New 
York but little known to the public at large. 
Towards the end there came to him success, a 
competence and something that might be called 
celebrity if not fame. But it was marvellous 
how his light remained hid. The time came 
when the best known magazines eagerly sought 
his work. He could have commanded his own 
price. But the notoriety of noisy success, the 
personal triumph of literary conspicuousness he 
neither achieved nor envied. A certain cruel 
experience of his earlier days — ^tragic, unmer- 
ited and not here to be recorded, — had left 
him shy of mankind at large and, in the per- 
sonal sense, anxious only for obscurity. Even 
when the American public in tens and hundreds 
of thousands read his matchless stories, they 

264 



The Amazing Genius of O. Henry 

read them, so to speak, in isolated fashion, as 
personal discoveries, unaware for years of the 
collective greatness of O. Henry's work viewed 
as a total. The few who were privileged to 
know him, seem to have valued him beyond all 
others and to have found him even greater 
than his work. And then, in mid-career as it 
seemed, there was laid upon him the hand of a 
wasting and mortal disease, which brought him 
slowly to his end, his courage and his gentle 
kindliness unbroken to the last. "I shall die," 
he said one winter with one of the quoted 
phrases that fell so aptly from his lips, "in the 
good old summer time." And "in the good old 
summer time" with a smile and a jest upon his 
lips he died. "Don't turn down the light," he 
is reported to have said to those beside his bed, 
and then, as the words of a popular song flick- 
ered across his mind, he added, "Fm afraid to 
go home in the dark." 

That was five years ago. Since his death, 
his fame in America has grown greater and 
greater with every year. The laurel wreath 
that should have crowned his brow is exchanged 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

for the garland laid upon his grave. And the 
time is coming, let us hope, when the whole 
English-speaking world will recognise in O. 
Henry one of the great masters of modern lit- 
erature. 



266 



A REHABILITATION 
OF CHARLES II 



IX.— A Rehabilitation of 
Charles II 



IT is perhaps a far cry from the subjects 
treated in the previous chapters to the 
topic of Charles the Second. But I have 
a special reason for introducing his name. 
In my schooldays Charles II was always my 
particular hero. His amiable common sense 
and his native good-humour seemed to mark 
him out from the fussy, self-important egotis- 
tic monarchs who sprawl wide anon the pages 
of history and obliterate from our view every- 
thing except their trivial personalities. I al- 
ways felt that if I ever had a chance I would 
like to do something for King Charles. I have 
it now. A whole book lies open to me, which 
I can fill as I like. I cannot conclude this vol- 
ume of essays better than by devoting the last 
of them to the memory of one whose character 
I would wish to imitate and for whose quaint 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

and inimitable humour I have long cherished a 
despairing admiration. 

In any case the subject which I propose to 
treat is eminently congenial to the peculiar 
tendencies of the historical writing of our time. 
Historical rehabilitation is emphatically the or- 
der of the day, and it has become the peculiar 
province and the particular pride of the mod- 
ern historian to expose the errors of his prede- 
cessors. His superior access to original sources 
of information enables him to direct upon the 
events of the past a flood of "dry light" which 
reveals them In a new perspective. The lights 
and shadows are shifted upon the landscape 
of history. What formerly appeared imposing 
dwindles to the enlightened eye, and figures 
forgotten In the obscurity of ignorance are re- 
vealed In a new and majestic stature. The 
estimates of character and achievement which 
have formed the commonplaces of our national 
knowledge are overthrown, and the temple of 
fame rudely cleared of Its former Inmates to 
make way for the smiling crowd of whlte- 

270 



A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

washed sinners carrying each his new certificate 
of rehabilitation. 

Washington and Lady Jane Grey veil their 
shamed faces and hurry from its portals to 
give place to Machiavelli and Madame de Pom- 
padour. Thus it is that we live in an age of 
historical surprises. We know now that Rome 
was not founded by Romulus, that the apple 
shot by William Tell was not lying on his son's 
head at the immediate time of the shooting, 
and that America was not in the true sense of 
the term discovered by Christopher Columbus, 
who had spent eighteen years of tearful per- 
suasion in trying to prove that there was no 
such continent. As with the events of history 
so with the characters that have adorned or 
defiled its pages. In the light of our recent 
knowledge we know that Hump-backed Rich- 
ard had no hump at all, but was on the contrary 
of a singularly erect and commanding figure, the 
name "hump-backed" being merely an expres- 
sion of easy familiarity and subtle flattery, as 
who should say "short" to a tall man, or "fatty" 
of a man deplorably thin. The secret suffoca- 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

tion of Richard's nephews In the Tower Is not 
to be attributed to him as a fault. He suffo- 
cated them secretly because to have suffocated 
them In any other way would have seemed 
needlessly ostentatious. In the same way, Pope 
Gregory VII now appears to have been an ar- 
dent Protestant. The Duke of Clarence, whose 
name has suffered from his connection with a 
certain butt of Malmsey wine, was a total ab- 
stainer. The Borgias were quiet people dis- 
tinguished only by their love of gardening and 
the rectitude of their family relations. On the 
reverse side, Washington was a lifelong slave- 
driver, Queen Elizabeth did her utmost, 
whether deliberately or by negligence, to help 
the Spanish Armada, and Pitt, the darling of 
his country, died, not with a prayer for Eng- 
land's welfare on his hps, as our school books 
taught us, but murmuring that he "thought he 
could eat a pork pie." 

In so far as I am aware, there are at pres- 
ent no historical characters to whom this proc- 
ess of rehabilitation or the reverse has not been 
applied, with the exception of Charles II. In 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

undertaking the defence of so amiable a 
personage, I need hardly offer an apology. 
Charles II belongs to a general class of indi- 
viduals who have never yet met their true 
deserts at the hands of their contemporaries 
and successors. Too much has been said of 
the heroes of history, — the strong men, the 
strenuous men, the troublesome men; too little 
of the amiable, the kindly, and the tolerant. 
It is perhaps the strenuous and the purposeful 
who keep the wheels of human progress mov- 
ing, but it is the broad-minded tolerance of easy- 
going Indolence that keeps the friction of opin- 
ion from clogging the machlnci-y of progress. 
The strenuous men have had their apotheosis: 
their names are inscribed In brass, their busts 
are carved in stone on the temples and monu- 
ments of an admiring world. But where is the 
record of the nobly indolent, the names of 
those great men whose resolute inertia and 
whose self-denying negation of the necessity of 
effort have rendered possible the false emi- 
nence of their fellows? In the history of reli- 
gious controversy the real progress has been 

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made by those inspired with an intense lack 
of fixed opinion: the history of invention is 
the history of applied idleness. To shirk work 
is to abbreviate labour. To shirk argument is 
to settle controversy. To shirk war is to cher- 
ish peace. 

Much that has been written to the disparage- 
ment of Charles II is in reality to be ascribed 
to the essential superiority of his mind. He 
possessed in an eminent degree that largeness 
of view, that breadth of mental vision which 
sees things in their true perspective. He had 
grasped as but few men have done the great 
truth that nothing really matters very much. 
He was able to see that the burning questions 
of to-day become the forgotten trifles of yes- 
terday, and that the eager controversy of the 
present fades into the litter of the past. To 
few it has been given to see things as they are, 
to know that no opinion is altogether right, 
no purpose altogether laudable, and no calam- 
ity altogether deplorable. To carry in one's 
mind an abiding sense of the futility of human 
endeavour and the absurdity of human desire 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

is a sure protection against the malignant nar- 
rowness that marks the men endowed with 
fixed convictions and positive Ideas. For the 
same reason it is found that the man of real 
enlightenment Is Inevitably reckoned a trifler 
and is accused of shallowness and insincerity, 
while a dull man heavily digesting his few ideas 
is credited with a profundity which he does not 
possess. In this lies the real explanation of 
the alleged mental frivolity and culpable levity 
of Charles II. While London was burning he 
is said to have chased a moth up and down 
the room absorbed with the amusement of the 
pursuit. He habitually slept during the ser- 
mons of the court preacher before whom deco- 
rum compelled his bodily presence. He lounged 
in the gallery of the House of Lords declaring 
their debates '^as good as a play." He scrib- 
bled little jokes to Clarendon across the Coun- 
cil table. For literary exercise he wrote rid- 
dles in rhyme, no doubt a great improvement 
on the hymns written by his father and the 
philosophical treatises of his grandparent. He 
twitted the Royal Society with spending all 

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their time in "weighing air''; and perplexed 
their proceedings for a month by requesting 
a solution of the problem, "Why is it that a 
bucket of water into which a live fish is thrown 
weighs no more after the fish is put in than 
it did before?" The king indeed was never 
tired of a jest, and was able to appreciate the 
point of a joke, even if turned against himself. 
The whole chronicle of his personal life is 
illuminated by his exquisite sense of humour. 
No man has left behind him a more lasting 
monument of witty sayings than did Charles. 
Yet his humour was always of that tolerant 
gentle character that bespeaks of lofty mind. 
"Good jests," he said, "ought to bite like lambs, 
not dogs: they should cut, not wound." As a 
child of seven he wrote his royal tutor, "I 
would not have you take too much Phisik, for 
it doth alwaies make me worse, and I think 
it will do the like with you." Here we have 
already the balanced mind rising superior to 
the prejudices of his time. He died, as every 
history tells us, with a murmured apology on 
his lips for being "such an unconscionable time 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

in dying." Throughout his long and varied 
career the central feature in his view of life 
was that of a kindly amusement at the little- 
ness of human things. The mummeries of 
kingship, the formalities of state did not de- 
ceive him. "I would willingly," he said one 
day to Clarendon, "make a visit to my sister; 
where can I find the time?" "I suppose," an- 
swered Clarendon, "your Majesty will go with 
a light train." "I intend to take nothing but 
my night bag." "You will not," expostulated 
the minister, "travel without 40 or 50 horse." 
"I count that part of my night bag," said the 
king. Even at the great crises of his life his 
humour did not desert him. "The truth is," 
he declared during the troublous year of the 
Test Act, — "that this year the government" 
(meaning of course himself) "thrives marvel- 
lous well, for it eats and drinks and sleeps as 
heartily as I have ever known It, nor does it 
vex and disquiet Itself with that foolish, idle 
and impertinent thing called business." A lit- 
tle later when his brother James expressed his 
apprehensiveness lest Charles's conduct might 

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lead to his expulsion from the throne, ^'Never 
fear, James," said the amiable monarch, ''they 
will never get rid of me to make you king." 
It Is due to this habit of constant jesting that 
the quality of the king's intellect has been so 
sadly underrated. Endowed in reality with 
mental capacity of the highest order, the very 
superiority of his mind led him to disparage 
the serious concerns of life and to attach a 
seemingly inordinate importance to the trifles 
of the passing hour. 

But let us turn from the general character 
of Charles to consider the political aspect of 
his reign. Under what a heavy burden of 
obloquy Charles rests I need hardly remind the 
reader. His memory for 200 years has been a 
target for the sneering criticism of generations 
of historians. Piety has denounced the amiable 
king's lack of religion; patriotism has felt its 
breast swell at his mysterious dealings with the 
crown of France; cynicism has sneered at his 
levity and thoughtlessness, and matronly vir- 
tue frowns with perennial disapproval of the 
most indecorous of sovereigns. "He was," 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

says Hume, ''negligent of the interests of the 
nation, careless of its glory, averse to its reli- 
gion, jealous of its liberty, lavish of its treas- 
ure, ... he exposed it to the danger of a 
furious civil war, and to the ruin and ignominy 
of a foreign conquest." To this Macaulay 
adds that he was "fond of sauntering and 
amusement, incapable of self-denial and exer- 
tion, without faith in human virtue or human 
attachment." "He shewed," says Mr. Airy, 
the latest of his indignant biographers, "a more 
than oriental ingratitude." "All his natural 
advantages," writes Mr. Bright, "were neu- 
tralized by his selfishness: his own ease and 
pursuit of pleasure were the objects dearest to 
himself." Green mocks at his diplomacy. May 
doubts his constitutionality, and Goldwin Smith 
stands over his death bed with a satanic sneer 
at his last moments. More scathing than all, 
the virtuous pen of Arabella Buckley, writing 
for the benefit of beginners, chronicles the 
crowning indictment, — "he was not a good 
man." 

Gathering together all the different heads of 

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accusation that are preferred against Charles, 
we find them to be somewhat as follows. It 
is alleged against him that both his internal 
and external policy, as well as the irregularity 
of his private conduct, degraded and lowered 
the English monarchy; that he rendered him- 
self subservient to King Louis XIV of France, 
basely accepting gifts and a yearly pension to 
subvert the true interests of his kingdom; that 
he made war against the Dutch, and that he 
persecuted the Presbyterians. In point of reli- 
gion it is variously objected that he had too 
much and that he had none at all; some his- 
torians stand aghast at the fact that Charles 
was a devout Catholic, others are equally in- 
dignant that he was not a Catholic at all. 

In such a maze of accusation it is difficult 
to find one's way: to refute one charge is to 
concede another: to defend the king's memory 
from the attack of one writer is to expose him 
to the polemics of another. Let us, however, 
consider in detail some of the graver charges 
usually advanced. First of all may be placed 
the general bearing of Charles's reign on the 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

position of the English monarchy and the part 
he played, ill or otherwise, in the development 
of the constitution. And here let me state 
boldly and flatly my opinion, reached after 
forty-six years of profound reflection, that 
Charles II is to be looked upon as the true 
founder of the present monarchy; it is to him 
that a grateful and loyal people ought to 
attribute the survival and consolidation of 
monarchical institutions in England. We have 
heard too much of William III and George I; 
the chronic cough of the one and the hiccough- 
ing German of the other have been too long 
the object of the fervent admiration of the 
thankful Briton. The Protestant succession 
was undoubtedly a beautiful thing: we recog- 
nise the fact when at each successive corona- 
tion we invite our sovereign to swear to his 
detestation of popery in terms as offensively 
contrived as possible. But miraculous and ad- 
mirable as is the official protestantism of the 
monarch, it is not the prime consideration. The 
institution of monarchy itself is first to be con- 
sidered. The kingship is the central part of 

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the British constitution, the keystone of the 
political arch without which all else falls into 
confusion. It was the peculiar merit of 
Charles II that in an age of unparalleled civil 
turmoil he enabled the monarchy to survive. 
To his personal tact, his suavity, his kindliness, 
his superiority to the promptings of revenge, it 
is to be ascribed that the kingship, shaken from 
its base in the turmoil of the Civil war, was 
again established and consolidated. Consider 
the situation at the time of Charles's acces- 
sion. For eleven years England had been a 
republic. The divinity of kingship was gone. 
The nation had seen an outraged people rise 
against their monarch, dethrone him, and erect 
a successful and glorious commonwealth amid 
the ruins of the monarchy. It is all very well 
for historians to argue that the Commonwealth 
was a virtual monarchy, that Cromwell was in 
reality a king and the substance of monarchical 
institutions remained when the form vanished. 
The fact remains that in name at any rate, — 
and the name is everything in the British sys- 
tem, — Cromwell was not king of England. 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

Nor had he any connection by descent, affilia- 
tion, or adoption with any previous sovereign. 
He was in reality merely the elected head of 
the people, — the strong man chosen by his own 
ability and ruling by a delegated power. The 
Instrument of Government drawn up as the 
new basis of English institutions was nothing 
more or less than the constitution of a repub- 
lic. It was an embodiment of the theory of 
democratic popular sovereignty, a hundred 
years in advance of the great political experi- 
ments of America and France. The restored 
monarchy, welcomed as it was with the clap- 
ping of hands and the guzzling of wine, rested 
on ho firm basis. Placed in the hands of a 
king devoid of the peculiar personality of 
Charles II, it would have fallen again, this 
time to rise no more. Charles knew, the 
shrewder royalists knew, and the leaders of 
the outgoing republic knew that the monarchy 
was on its trial, that it was not of necessity the 
last phase of the political evolution, the con- 
cluding act of the great drama of the 17th cen- 
tury. Monk himself, who lives in history as 

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the restorer of the royal sun to the darkened 
land, knew this and acted on It. He urged 
upon the king to fill his council with the adher- 
ents of the late regime: he put no trust In a 
purely monarchical establishment. He saw 
hovering in the background of the newly illu- 
minated political sky the retreating cloud of 
puritan republicanism that might again obscure 
its effulgence. Consider the matter in the rea- 
sonable light of common sense. Charles re- 
turned after eleven years of exile to a people 
that scarcely knew him, from whose midst he 
had been expelled before he was twenty years 
of age. By birth he was half a foreigner, by 
residence he had become more than half an 
alien. Of his new subjects a good half had 
been in arms, or in sympathy with those in 
arms against all that was associated with his 
family name. Till the very moment of his 
coronation a veteran puritan soldiery was un- 
der arms. Welcome him as might the syco- 
phants of the court and the devotees of the 
wine vat, his accession was only wrung with 
reluctance from the puritan part of the nation. 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

Nothing but the strained circumstances of the 
moment induced them to give to his kingship 
a reluctant and provisional assent. At the 
opening of his reign a false step would have 
been fatal. To have played the monarch too 
much would have fanned to a new flame the 
embers of the civil war: to have played it too 
little would have alienated all on whose sup- 
port the new king was chiefly compelled to rely. 
Imagine, if one can, some of the other kings 
of the period placed in the situation in which 
Charles found himself. Had the narrow and 
malignant James, his brother, been called to 
the throne, the kingship could not have lasted 
out the year. Under the witless guidance of 
his slobbering grandfather, the first James, or 
under the unbending arrogance of his father, 
or the pretentious absolutism of his relative, 
Louis XIV, the kingship would have met a 
speedy downfall. Under Charles II the mon- 
archy, restored with hesitation and doubt, 
slowly proved itself to the nation as the guar- 
antee of internal stability and domestic peace. 
The reason for this lies in the natural adapta- 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

bility of the new monarch to his unique situa- 
tion. He had not been a month upon the 
throne before the malcontent part of his nation 
felt that the new era was not to be one of 
vengeance and retaliation for the past. The 
down-trodden royalists who had nursed for 
eleven years their hatred of the dominant re- 
publicans now clamoured for the blood of their 
enemies. They urged the king to the whole- 
sale slaughter of the opposing faction. Had 
Charles listened to his new parliament a sweep- 
ing Act would have been passed for the execu- 
tion of all the prominent survivors of the 
Commonwealth party. Let us take the unwill- 
ing testimony of Mr. Airy on this point. 

"In one part at least of the partial fulfil- 
ment of the Declaration from Breda, Charles 
took an important and creditable share. There 
was great danger- — greater danger as the days 
passed — that, in spite of the composite char- 
acter of the House of Commons, the spirit of 
retaliation might even there secure a bloody 
satisfaction. But a far more savage temper 
reigned in the Lords. The bill sent up from 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

the Commons, in consequence of an urgent 
message from the king, 'excepted' (from the 
general amnesty) only eight of the king's 
judges, 'for life and estate,' and some twenty 
more 'for pains and penalties not extending to 
life.' The Lords resolved that all who had 
signed the warrant should die, and then 'all 
who were concerned in the murder.' Again 
Charles intervened. He insisted upon drawing 
a broad line between the regicides and all 
others. But for his promise, he told the Lords 
plainly, neither he nor they would have been 
there; his own honour and the public security 
alike demanded an indemnity for all except 
those Immediately guilty of the crying sin. In 
the conferences between the houses, the Lords 
actually demanded the death of four members 
of Cromwell's High Court of Justice In re- 
venge for the death of four of their own num- 
ber condemned by that court, the victims to be 
chosen by the relations of the slain men. They 
even proposed to bring to the scaffold all who 
sat upon any court of justice by which Roy- 
alists had been tried. ... It should not be 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

forgotten that it was principally owing to 
Charles (and Clarendon) that, after a civil 
war which had its roots in the deepest feelings 
which can stir men's minds, after a despotism 
which had been established in blood and held 
Its place amid the ruins of the constitution by 
the sword and only by the sword, the restora- 
tion of the old order was accomplished with 
slaughter which, when compared with the 
wrongs which seemed to call for vengeance, 
was well nigh insignificant." 

So much for Mr, Airy, whose unwilling evi- 
dence is corroborated by the testimony of prac- 
tically all the historians of the period. It is 
impossible to overestimate the political impor- 
tance of the king's opportune clemency or to 
refuse to recognise the sublimity of mind to 
which it bears proof. More than any of his 
subjects the new king had wrongs to avenge. 
His father's head had fallen upon the scaffold, 
he himself had been hounded into exile, escap- 
ing from his kingdom after weeks of imminent 
peril, compelled to wander deserted and shelter- 
less, to know the pangs of hunger and to find 

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L4 Rehabilitation of Charles II 

himself destitute and penniless, a pensioner on 
the niggardly bounty of continental sovereigns. 
Had he been sufficiently ruthless and sufficiently 
impolitic he might for the moment have sated 
his vengeance in blood. The temper of his 
royalist supporters would have stopped at no 
extremes of retaliation. Pepys has left us in 
his Diary an account of the horrible butchery 
of Major-General Harrison, one of the regi- 
cides killed amid the plaudits of a sanguinary 
populace. "I went out," he writes, **to Char- 
ing Cross to see Major-General Harrison 
hanged, drawn, and quartered, which was done 
there; he looked as cheerful as any man could 
look in that condition. He was presently cut 
down and his head and heart shown to the 
people at which there were great shouts of 
joy." It was, as already said, Charles him- 
self who imposed his veto on further execu- 
tions. "I must confess," he said, "that I am 
weary of hanging except on new offences: let 
it sleep." Pepys bears witness to the king's 
clemency in saying, — "The king is a man of so 
great compassion that he would willingly acquit 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

them all." If we turn from the internal history 
of England to the history of her colonies, we 
find that Charles's clemency made itself felt 
even there. In Virginia the struggles of the 
mother country had been reproduced on a 
smaller scale, and the restoration of the king 
brought with it the restoration of the royalist 
governor. Sir William Berkeley. The colonists, 
outraged by the stringency of the governor 
and his cavalier associates, broke into revolt, 
a revolt which collapsed as rapidly as it had 
started, owing to the death of the rebel leader. 
Berkeley at once set himself to the work of re- 
taliation, — hanging and confiscating with an 
unsparing hand. The slaughter found no end 
until an imperative personal message from 
King Charles ordered Berkeley to stop. *'That 
old fool," said Charles, in comment on the gov- 
ernor's conduct, "has put to death more people 
in that naked country than I did here for the 
murder of my father." 

Enough has been said to establish on good 
authority the fact of Charles the Second's ex- 
traordinary magnanimity of mind. As he had 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

shewed himself at his accession, so he remained 
throughout his reign. To cherish resentment 
was foreign to his nature, which seemed inca- 
pable of harbouring a personal animosity. 

Let us now turn from the question of 
Charles II's general relation towards the mon- 
archy to his dealings with the parliament. 
Doubtless we have all retained from our recol- 
lection of the history of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the general idea that Charles, like his 
father and grandfather before him, refused to 
govern according to the wishes of his parlia- 
ments. In this, by the way, he resembled not 
only his father and grandfather, but also good 
Queen Elizabeth, patriotic King Henry, and 
many other royal notabilities of preceding cen- 
turies. But let us admit in its full extent the 
fact that, from the beginning to the end of 
his reign of twenty-five years, Charles had not 
the remotest intention of governing according 
to the will of parliament. Now this may seem 
a very shocking and dreadful thing — it may at 
first sight seem to carry with it sufficient con- 
demnation of the king's administration. But 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

to judge it so is to apply to the seventeenth 
century the ideas of the twentieth, and to con- 
found institutions, which, while preserving their 
names, have entirely altered in character in the 
course of two hundred years. We of the twen- 
tieth century are accustomed to a royal regime 
that has become of a purely nominal character. 
Our king reigns but does not govern. It is his 
elevated function to deliver speeches which he 
does not compose, to give thanks for money 
which he does not get, to talk in the old lordly 
style of his troops, his navy, the war that he 
means to make, and the peace that he hopes to 
effect. But his real business consists in laying 
the foundation stones of public buildings, turn- 
ing the first sod of railways, planting the first 
trees in botanical gardens, unveiling statues, 
pictures, and inscriptions, giving thanks, re- 
ceiving thanks, bowing and being bowed to. 
These are the avocations that keep him busy, 
happy, harmless. To my mind there is some- 
thing eminently pathetic in the twentieth- 
century king with his frock coat, his building 
trowel, his spade, his tree, his statues and the 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

other paraphernalia of his office, his false mag- 
nificence and his actual Impotence. He is colo- 
nel of ten regiments and does not command a 
single man, the head of a navy and has no 
power to fire a single gun, wears, in his days 
of grandeur, twenty uniforms in forty minutes 
and finds none to fit him. But this happy de- 
vice by which the jaded monarch of the twen- 
tieth century, — the mere astral body of old- 
time kingship — is put through his paces at the 
bidding of a democratic nation, — this is the cre- 
ation of the later time. In the seventeenth 
century nominal kingship did not exist, and was 
not dreamed of. To think it a proper ground 
of accusation against Charles II that he in- 
tended to govern his own kingdom, is to lose 
sight of historical perspective. As well re- 
proach the England of his day for its lack of 
public education, its need of railroads, and the 
paucity of its newspapers, as object against a 
king of the seventeenth century that he Intended 
to govern his own kingdom. William III him- 
self had just the same intention, though the 
limitations of his situation and character pre- 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

vented him from carrying it so fully into effect. 
Charles himself was perfectly clear and con- 
sistent in his views on this point. He intended 
to govern by royal prerogative (and I use the 
word in no offensive sense), aided by the ad- 
vice of his parliament whenever such advice 
seemed sensible and reasonable. Nor did he 
by royal prerogative mean a monarchical 
tyranny. He meant the enlightened rule of 
the head of the nation, directed in the general 
interests. ''I will never use arbitrary govern- 
ment myself," he said to the turbulent and 
impossible parliament that met him at Oxford 
towards the close of his reign, "and am re- 
solved not to suffer it in others." His char- 
acteristic point of view, indicated with the 
king's characteristically kindly spirit of com- 
radeship, appears in his reception to a group 
of Berkshire petitioners, begging him not to de- 
lay in calling a new parliament (1680). "Gen- 
tlemen," said the amiable monarch, "we will 
argue the matter over a cup of ale when we 
meet at Windsor, though I wonder that my 
neighbours should meddle with my business." 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

But it Is not only to be remembered that 
between the days of the Restoration and our 
time the recognised duties of the British king 
have altered: the parliament Itself has under- 
gone a change equally Important. The parlia- 
ment of our day represents the whole adult 
nation: it is chosen in fair open election by 
the people of the realm, and when it speaks 
it speaks with the voice of national authority. 
It has learned by the traditions and experience 
of preceding centuries to respect the existence 
within itself of a dissentient minority. His 
Majesty's Opposition is as much a part of our 
working constitution as His Majesty's admin- 
istration. A modern parliament does not seek 
by the sheer brute force of a majority vote to 
slaughter Its enemies, to Impose its religion, 
to rob its opponents, and to victimize all who 
oppose it. Inspired by a just sense of its power 
and responsibilities, it seeks to represent the 
nation and not the uppermost faction of the 
hour, while the facilities offered by the modern 
press, ease of communication, and general en- 
lightenment accord to Its every determination 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

the irresistible support or the irresistible con- 
demnation of public opinion. 

Now look at the parliaments of the seven- 
teenth century. I need hardly remind my 
readers in how far they were representative. 
They were chosen from a minority of the Eng- 
lish people. Not one person in fifty had any 
share in the choice of the House of Commons. 
England in the reign of Charles II was no more 
a democratic country than Spain. Its parlia- 
ment represented not the nation, but merely 
the different factions of the land-owning class, 
keen in the pursuit of their own interest, firm 
in the suppression of the labouring masses, vin- 
dictive and implacable in their factional strife. 
To have turned loose the parliaments of 
Charles II to govern under a trowel-using, tree- 
planting king would have delivered the nation 
over to an unending strife of rival cliques and 
irresponsible factions. For proof of this, con- 
sider a moment the composition and character 
of the parliaments of Charles II. There were 
in all four of them. One that met in 1660 and 
lasted until 1679, one in 1679, one called in 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 



1680, and a final parliament summoned In 1681 
at Oxford, where the king claimed that the *^air 



was sweeter." 



The parliament of 1660 has been described 
as the "worst parliament that ever sat/' This 
is strong language, but the authority is that 
of a writer of competence and long a professor 
at Oxford. It has been described by a con- 
temporary as a "parliament full of young men 
chosen by a furious people in spite of the Puri- 
tans." The youth of the members, it is only 
fair to say, did not alarm the king. "It Is no 
great fault," he said, "as I mean to keep them 
till they have got beards." Keep them indeed 
he did for eighteen years, during which the rec- 
ord of their legislation, which would have been 
infinitely worse but for the opposition of the 
king, stands on the statute books as a lasting 
memorial of their Incompetence and savagery. 
Heedless of the king's earnest plea for full reli- 
gious toleration, they insisted on passing the 
series of statutes that rendered the era one of 
bitter religious persecution. I need not recall 
in detail the inhuman and unjust provisions of 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

the Act of Uniformity, the Corporation Act, 
the Conventicle Act, and the Five-Mile Act. 
Dissenters and Catholics alike groaned under 
the scourge of parliamentary tyranny, while 
the victorious faction thrust on an unwilling 
nation the burden of an Anglican establish- 
ment. Read if you will of the long-borne suf- 
ferings of imprisoned ministers and hunted 
priests, the family prayer rudely Interrupted 
by officers of the law, the Quakers dragged 
through the streets of London, death, confisca- 
tion and the iron hand of bigoted Intolerance 
throughout the land, and you may realise the 
part played by the restoration parliament In 
the history of the church. Had they been given 
but a king of their own complexion, or a king 
willing to efface himself at their bidding, the 
nation would have known the horrors of a reli- 
gious war. Nor Is It In point of religion alone 
that this first of Charles's parliaments shewed 
its Intolerance and Ignorance. It was this same 
body that passed the iniquitous Act of Settle- 
ment to hold the agricultural poor In their serf- 
dom to the landed classes, and framed the 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

Navigation Code to render the American Colo- 
nies the tributaries of the mother country. 

To the second parliament of Charles II is 
ascribed the lasting renown of passing the Ha- 
beas Corpus Act, which has left an undeserved 
celebrity to its memory. This may be appre- 
ciated when it is known that the Act really was 
not supported by a majority, but that in order 
to squeeze it through the parliamentary tellers, 
in counting the members, counted one exces- 
sively fat gentleman by bulk instead of by tale, 
and reckoned him as ten votes for the bill. 

Much has been written in reference to the 
religion or the irreligion of Charles 11. It 
has been laid to his charge as a grave crime 
that he was a Roman Catholic, and that at the 
moment of his death he received the last sac- 
raments of that church at the hands of a popish 
priest. Now let us admit that, to the minds 
of a great many people of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, to be a Roman Catholic was in and of it- 
self a heinous offence. The Catholic belief was 
viewed as a sinful thing, the Catholic ritual 
as an idolatrous enormity. This was the era 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

when Jesuit priests lay hidden at the risk of 
their lives in country homes of those who still 
clung to the old belief, when popish priests 
were forbidden on pain of death to enter the 
northern colonies in America. Granting the 
full atrocity of Catholic belief in the minds of 
many of Charles's subjects, are we still to re- 
gard such a creed as a crime? Civilised hu- 
manity has long since recognised that religious 
opinion cannot be coerced, that every man has 
at least a right to his own belief about his own 
soul. If Charles II believed in a doctrine of 
salvation that is still the most widely accepted 
of all Christian faiths, wherein lies the sin? 
Let us place before the devout Protestant 
reader of British history a reversed case. We 
will imagine a French king, compelled from 
his policy to grant a nominal adherence to the 
ritual and outward formalities of Roman Ca- 
tholicism, but cherishing in his secret heart a 
sustaining faith in the Protestant creed and 
calling to his death bed the services of a Scot- 
tish Calvinist to administer to him a final ser- 
mon on the inevitable damnation of the unjust. 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

I cannot but think that such a monarch, had 
there ever been one, would have met from the 
Protestant world no such obloquy as has been 
given to the unfortunate Charles: his name 
would rather have been cited among great ex- 
amples of triumphant Protestantism, a sover- 
eign mindful of the welfare of his soul in 
despite of the temptations of his idolatrous 
surroundings. 

But I do not incline to think that Charles was 
a Roman Catholic. In point of applied religion 
he was indeed a somewhat easy-going practi- 
tioner. He slept in church — this I believe be- 
ing the first authenticated case of the custom 
— and he entertained a constitutional aversion 
to sernions. References to the ultimate punish- 
ment of sin were alien to his kindly instincts. 
The Scotch, indeed, during his ill-assorted 
union with them after his father's death had 
cured him of all taste for theology, and the 
three-hour sermons to which he had been com- 
pelled to submit during his Caledonian king- 
ship had supplied him with a fund of com- 
pressed piety quite sufficient for all his future 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

needs. A letter written during his kingship 
to his sister in Paris illustrates the king's view 
of sermons. ''We have," he writes, ''the same 
disease of sermons that you complain of there, 
but I hope you have the same convenience that 
the rest of the family has, of sleeping out most 
of the time, which is a great ease to those who 
are bound to hear them." One highly imper- 
tinent divine presumed to preach to the king 
upon the Irregularities of his private life. 
Charles contented himself with a gentle ad- 
monition: "Tell him," he said, "that I am not 
angry to be told of my faults; but I would 
have It done In gentlemanlike manner." At 
another time we read of the king's pathetic 
complaint of an enthusiastic preacher who had 
"played the fool upon the doctrine of purga- 
tory," and of another reverend gentleman who 
had compelled Charles to listen to what he 
called "a quite unnecessary sermon on the doc- 
trine of original sin." 

But after properly weighing the available 
evidence I do not think that Charles II is to 
be classed as a believer in Roman Catholicism. 

302 



A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

His religious belief appears indeed to have 
been unusually broad and philosophic, — the 
natural outcome of his absence of prejudice, — 
and to have led him to accept tenets taken 
from the dogmas of many different sects while 
granting a full adherence to none. His point 
of view in some respects was decidedly Cal- 
vinistlc, in others emphatically Lutheran, while 
in more Intricate points of religion he shows 
a strongly Soclnian temper. There was much 
In his creed that was decidedly Manichaean, 
much that was Unitarian, not a little that was 
Trinitarian, and a great deal that was Latl- 
tudinarian. He held for example that It made 
no difference to his future salvation what he 
did In this world. This was pure Calvinism. 
The Soclnians, It will be remembered, held that 
it made no difference whether the soul was an 
Incorporated substance or an Invisible essence. 
In this Charles entirely agreed with them. He 
agreed with the Lutherans In denying the Im- 
portance of justification by works, but sided 
with the Antlnomians In doubting the need of 
justification by faith. He was willing to con- 



Essays and Literary Studies 

cede the Unitarian doctrine that perhaps there 
Is no such person as the devil, while not deny- 
ing the Anglican contention that perhaps there 
Is. It appears In all that the king's religious 
view was that delicately balanced character 
which appreciates the niceties of opposing doc- 
trines but refrains from a final decision of the 
points In controversy. 

Whatever was Charles's creed, there should 
be no doubt of the excellence of his heart. The 
monster of oriental ingratitude is a fiction of 
Ill-disposed historians. Towards the parasites 
and sycophants of his court, it Is true, he rec- 
ognised no obligation whatever: he estimated 
them at their true worth and thrust them aside 
with contempt when it suited his fancy to be 
rid of them. But towards his real friends — 
those who had befriended him in exile or coun- 
selled him well in prosperity — he bore a last- 
ing gratitude. The dismissal of Clarendon is 
often laid to his charge, but the charge Is with- 
out foundation. For seven years after his res- 
toration Charles had tolerated the familiaf 
dictation of a minister who, affectionate, loyal 

304 



A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

and well meaning as he was, never realised that 
the king was no longer a fugitive stripling un- 
able to think or act for himself. Clarendon 
fell, as Bismarck and others have fallen, a 
victim to the overweening assertlveness of senile 
wisdom. 

To understand how abiding was Charles's 
sense of gratitude one need but read the long 
list of pensions and presents to all those, high 
and low, who had befriended him during his 
flight after the final defeat at Worcester. It 
has been maliciously objected that many of 
these handsome pensions and gratuities were 
left unpaid. Such an ungenerous criticism Is 
scarcely worthy of remark. The state of 
Charles's exchequer frequently compelled him 
to forego the satisfaction of his private gra- 
tuities. It is at any rate a fact that not a few 
of the pensions are paid by the British gov- 
ernment to this day. 

It has become a commonplace with histo- 
rians to point to the foreign policy of Charles 
II (and in particular to his relations with 
France) as one of the gravest of his iniquities. 

305 



Essays and Literary Studies 

It IS quite true that he sold Dunkirk to the 
French, but this far from being a diplomatic 
blunder was dictated by the wisest policy. Dun- 
kirk, lying as It does on the French side of the 
Straits of Dover, and affording to England a 
fortified base of operations against the French, 
could never have permanently remained a Brit- 
ish possession. It Is not, like Gibraltar, an 
isolated rock; It Is an integral part of the 
French territory. Its retention by England 
would have been a standing guarantee of in- 
veterate hostility. To sell It to the French was 
at once the part of prudence and generosity. 

It Is not generally known, but It Is neverthe- 
less a fact, that no one more than Charles was 
alive to the possibility of England's naval de- 
velopment, or more anxious for the expansion 
of England as a great maritime power. Had 
he been free from the factious opposition of a 
niggardly parliament, the era of Rodney and 
Nelson might have been anticipated by a hun- 
dred years. From his youth the king cher- 
ished a passion for the sea; yachting was his 
favourite pastime, and for ships and sailors 

306 



A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

of England he entertained an unalterlng affec- 
tion. The diarist Pepys, himself an official in 
the service of the admiralty, bears ample wit- 
ness to Charles's profound interest in the navy. 
The king was never too busy to talk of his 
ships and to make plans for the naval expan- 
sion of British power. That England did not 
under his reign become a real naval power is 
no fault of Charles II: the blame is to be 
ascribed to the shortsighted policy of his par- 
liament. With his wife's dowry he had re- 
ceived from Portugal, Tangier, a seaport of 
Morocco. This Charles planned to make a 
Mediterranean basis for English imperial 
power, a magnificent project that lay near his 
heart, but which the ineptitude of his advisers 
compelled him to relinquish. 

The king himself has left us In general terms 
an admirable defence of his foreign policy. 
Some witty individual having remarked of him 
that he never said a foolish thing and never 
did a wise one, the saying reached the royal 
ears. Charles's good-natured comment was, 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

"That may well be, since my discourse is my 
own, but my actions are my ministers'." 

I should have liked in concluding this essay 
to offer a full explanation of Charles's treat- 
ment of the Scotch Covenanters. This unfor- 
tunately the limited time and space at my dis- 
posal will not allow, and I must content myself 
with a few words of general palliation. In the 
first place it must be admitted that the Scotch 
are a troublesome people. The history of Scot- 
land is the history of trouble. I do not say 
that persecution is good for the Scotch, but it 
may be doubted whether it is bad for them. At 
least it is to be noted that with the removal of 
religious persecution has come the disintegra- 
tion and disruption of the Presbyterian church. 
It may possibly have been from a sagacious 
foreknowledge of the internecine strife of the 
Free Kirk, the Wee Kirk, the Auld Kirk, and 
the New Kirk, that Charles was led to try to 
keep the Scotch united in rehgion by offering 
them the stimulus of ill-treatment necessary to 
their peculiar temperament. The Scotch are 
never happy unless in adversity, never admira- 

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A Rehabilitation of Charles II 

ble except in calamity. They prefer bad 
weather to good, rain to sunshine, and ever- 
lasting damnation to the promise of perpetual 
bliss. Were this justification not amply suffi- 
cient, I might urge that Charles had suffered 
much at the hands of sermonising divines, that 
his treatment of the Scotch met the full ap- 
proval of the most devout people of the South- 
ern kingdom, and that after all the Scotch 
might have escaped ill-treatment by conversion 
to the Church of England. But I forbear to 
push these arguments to a conclusion, as I have 
already trespassed too long upon my readers' 
indulgence. 

In conclusion, let me recall a short anecdote 
of the most illustrious of American humourists. 
Returning from a journey to Colorado, Mark 
Twain informed his friends with enthusiasm 
that he had sojourned beside a mountain lake 
whose waters were of such transparent limpid- 
ity that a ten-cent piece might be clearly seen 
lying on the bottom at a depth of lOO fathoms. 
Finding himself confronted with a distressing 
incredulity he offered to make a discount on 

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Essays and Literary Studies 

the story at a fair compromise, and to say that 
at any rate a ten-dollar bill might have been 
seen floating on the surface. Similarly, let me 
say to my readers that though they may be con- 
scientiously unable to digest all that I have 
told them of Charles II, I shall be nevertheless 
amply satisfied if they will believe the half 
of it. 



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